To fulfill the promises of Augmented Reality (AR) in the manufacturing and maintenance industry, the development of AR application has to become faster, simpler and cheaper. Since typical AR applications make use of basic functionality like reading markers and displaying simple overlays, a clever combination of such basic building blocks would ease the development of complex AR applications. In this paper, we present a distributed architecture for creating and managing basic AR services, e.g. for information management, user interaction, and documentation. This way, complex AR processes can be orchestrated from those services for being used in different application domains.

Mixed reality techniques have high potential to support the development of complex systems that operate in a real world environment, especially mechatronic systems. In our paper we present the Mixed Reality in the Loop design process that enables a seamless progression from an initial virtual prototype to the final system along the mixed reality continuum.

This paper describes a pragmatic approach for the design of hybrid user interfaces based on a number of extensions of an existing 3D authoring system. We present the design and realization of a visual framework dedicated to the prototyping of hybrid user interfaces. The rapid development environment was applied in a teaching context during lectures on advanced user interface design. The results showed that our framework provides a suitable tool to quickly design and test hybrid user interfaces.

We describe our approach of developing AR applications with expressive visual representations and realistic object behavior. We combine concepts from high-level scene graphs, physical simulation libraries and a Java binding for ARToolkit with the ideas of iterative prototyping and show that rapid development of expressive AR applications using Java is possible.

This paper applies the idea of a continuously testable design representation to authoring of augmented realities for mobile devices.