Integration of additive manufacturing and augmented reality in early design phases: a way to foster remote creativity

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has known a substantial growth in recent years. More and more designers are interested in using AM during the early design stages, and are not familiar with the opportunities provided by AM. Augmented Design with AM Methodology (ADAM 2 ) is a methodology which can help the designer to understand and exploit the potential of AM. This methodology can be explained through inspirational objects to represent the opportunities of AM. However, due to the substantial manufacturing expenses incurred in producing multiple sets of physical cubes of ADAM 2 during the product design process, this paper exploring the implementation of Augmented Reality (AR) technology as a cost-effective means to showcase and demonstrate these cubes. This paper presents the integration of 14 cubes and AR and evaluates whether virtual cubes could have similar performance as real cubes in terms of usability and AM potential. The digitalization of these inspirational objects and their inter-action through AR is proposed to overcome the limits of physical objects during early product design. Through a mobile device (e.g., smartphone) the user can interact through screen with virtual inspirational objects. An AR application is developed to let users have interaction with 14 virtual cubes as similar with manipulating with real cubes. Users could manipulate cubes and change their material with the markerless AR application. Then the prototyped AR application is tested by experiment. The result shows the virtual cubes can achieved promising performance as similar as the real cubes in the usability and demonstrating the potential of AM. In future work, experiments will be conducted to examine the impact of early design on creativity. Graphical abstract