Exploring Augmented Reality for Teaching Design for Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has a great potential of disrupting product design and supply chains in many industries by means of its unique capabilities when compared to traditional manufacturing. A wide range of designers would like to take advantage of AM to improve their designs, but they need assistance in learning and breaking out of their conventional manufacturing mindset in the early phases of the design process. Therefore, this study explores the use of Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance the learning experience of the existing Design Heuristics for Additive Manufacturing using Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) cards. In this study, we propose a modification of DfAM cards to include AR markers into the existing card design and hence provide a comprehensive visualization along with the information about heuristics and examples on the DfAM cards. This helps the user to understand the real-world structure of the final printed product before it is printed. The cross-platform game engine Unity is used for developing the AR models for this research. We also investigate the advantages that AR can provide as a visual interface. An expert review is conducted to obtain development feedback and a trial training session with students is carried out. The student evaluated positively the use of the AR app in their DfAM lecture and exercise.