AR Arc Welding App
Richa Agrawal | Jayesh Pillai
This project began as a B.Des P2 in the year 2020, by Richa Agrawal.
Abstract
One of the reasons for unemployment among youth in India is the significant disconnect between the school education and the opportunities, skills, and exposure necessary to achieve full potential and earn a livelihood. Various NGOs have taken initiatives to introduce vocational training as a part of mainstream education to create employment opportunities for students from low-income backgrounds on completion of schooling. The secondary schools in which such training is imparted often face a lack of space and infrastructure, regulatory restrictions and safety concerns. The objective of this project was to innovate using Augmented Reality (AR) to overcome the spatial and safety barriers that affect the efficiency of these vocational training programs. An interactive learning module was designed using marker-based mobile AR to aid in providing the knowledge as well as learning the skills required for welding. This learning module was evaluated with expert welding instructors and accordingly proposed to be used in government schools providing vocational training in welding. This project opens up the possibility of designing safe and accessible ways to develop vocational skills.
Outcomes
The final outcome of this project is a mobile application which uses marker-based AR which can be used on an Android phone (see video). An image of the marker needs to be present to use the application. A monopod or selfie stick would enable more appropriate practice for welding. This marker would be printed in the Multiple-Skill Foundation Course textbooks such that students can practise it at school with the guidance of the welding instructor and at home by themselves.
An evaluation was conducted primarily through experts in welding. After multiple iterations with improvements based on insights from testing, the final application was developed.
Publication
- Richa Agrawal and Jayesh Pillai. 2020. Augmented Reality Application in Vocational Education: A Case of Welding Training. In Proceedings of 2020 ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS’20), November 8-11, Lisbon, Portugal, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3380867.3426199