Authoring-by-Doing: Animating Work Instructions for Industrial Virtual Reality Learning Environments

With the rise of Virtual Reality, gaming is about to reach a new level of realism. The industry sector has recognized the technology’s potential too, especially for learning and training of assembly procedures and maintenance tasks. Although gaming and manufacturing industry seem to have different requirements at the first sight, both worlds can benefit from each other. One of the most cumbersome tasks when creating a VR application is the authoring of content, more specific the animation of characters and interactable objects. This paper describes the prototype for a Virtual Reality-supported learning and training application and presents a concept to simplify the authoring process of content with additional focus on animating assembly procedures. Our idea is to record actions performed by an expert in the VR environment. Trainees can watch the recorded actions as semi-transparent “ghost” animation and interactively mimic the set of instructions. By this “authoring-by-doing” approach, we hope to accelerate content creation for industrial VR-learning scenarios.