My Senior Design Project - an Augmented Reality Training Program
- katielg980
- Nov 30, 2023
- 2 min read
In my final year at LSU, I led a team through the ideation, design, and deployment of a stand-alone augmented reality (AR) training system for composite materials manufacturing (I'll call the process CMM).
Objective: Our sponsor requested a teaching aid for her CMM graduate and PhD students to make training less time-consuming for her.
Key engineering specs: The project required a functioning CMM tutorial in AR that was hands-free, educationally effective with clear instructions, facilitated intuitive user interactions, and provided multiple modes of interaction including voice and gesture controls to remain hands-free.
System Description: The AR training system fully guides a user on the CMM process without needing outside assistance from the sponsor. The user can see useful information including assistive holograms, clear manufacturing instructions, a professional user interface (UI), a reactive lighting system, knowledge-based checkpoint questions, and be a hands-off teaching aid for the sponsor compared to traditional training.
In future posts, I will highlight the holograms and UI that I developed (they're pretty cool).
Tools used for development:
Microsoft HoloLens 2
Unity
Microsoft Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK)
OneDrive (cloud storage)
The flow of the user experience:
So... was it good?
Yes.
Our user testing results exceeded expectations. My team was voted project of the year by the panel of engineer reviewers and was a fan favorite everywhere we presented it.
My takeaways:
I'm extremely proud of my work on this project.
Leading my team through the successful design and development was very fulfilling!
I hope to work on similar projects in my career.
Conducting user testing on the product was indescribably exciting and I was always eager to improve the design given user feedback.
Augmented reality is a fun field to develop in.
The HoloLens 2 is awesome!
