Minimal AR

The “minimal AR” authoring approach aims to provide procedural instructions (e.g., for assembly, maintenance) with optimized AR visual assets. It is based on Norman’s definitions of affordance and signifier. Affordance comes from a good object design that naturally communicates how to use it. In case of low affordance, a secondary source of information is needed: a signifier.

In the minimal AR approach, the virtual content that minimizes the gap between the information provided and that needed to understand the task is called “minimal AR signifier.” Using AR signifiers with more information than the minimal one would not be useful for operators to understand the task, but could increase the authoring effort. Instead, AR signifiers with less information would reduce performance with potential errors because operators could misinterpret the instruction.

However, defining the minimal AR signifier is not simple because, following the affordance definition, the minimal virtual content could differ depending on object properties and user capabilities regarding a given assembly scenario.

The final goal of our research is then to provide the scientific community and companies with practical industrial case studies on how to design minimal AR signifiers, according to the various information contained in procedural instructions.