Augmented reality-based instructor for origami

Abstract

Instruction manuals that come with consumer products have often been proven to be ineffective and unappealing. Despite efforts taken to mitigate the negative user experience with more visual elements, a gulf in evaluation still exist when user attempts to follow the instructions given. This Final Year Project makes use of an arising technology -- Augmented Reality to explore a novel form of instruction manual. Since Augmented Reality combines the real world and the digital interface, it provides an affordance to overlay instructions directly on top of the physical objects. To evaluate its ability in bridging the gulf of evaluating instructions, an Augmented Reality-based Origami Instructor is developed to guide user through an origami tutorial with a setup that consists of a laptop and an external webcam. The state of the paper is determined using algorithms that were built around computer vision functions provided by OpenCV. Instruction annotations are augmented on the actual paper to tell users where to fold in each step. User studies has found that users were able to interpret and execute an instruction more accurately using the system developed. They also showed a preference to use the system to learn making an origami.