Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies are increasingly finding their way into DoD maintenance training because of their ability to support hands-free, just-in-time (JIT) training and troubleshooting. In addition, these technologies reduce the need for physical training assets, thereby allowing learners to practice at their home station, rather than traveling to a dedicated training facility. A major impediment to the broad adoption of AR/VR training has been the advanced design and programming skills that are required to generate 3D content. Historically, the reuse and transformation of legacy maintenance training materials into immersive training content has been a time-consuming, manually-intensive process.
In this paper, we present an automated content creation pipeline that uses open source tools to convert legacy training content into interactive and immersive 3D content. We lay down an approach to automate this pipeline, thereby minimizing the number of steps required to convert the source material into usable 3D content. The content creation pipeline does not require any specialized AR/VR design and programming skills, thereby providing instructors full control over the content generation process via an intuitive immersive scene editor. The resulting 3D objects can be managed in libraries and subsequently reused multiple times.
This paper will also aim to define the scope of legacy training content and prioritize which conversions to develop based on required effort and the prevalence of legacy content. Finally, we conclude with the results of a U.S. Marine Corps training schoolhouse survey that identifies the most prevalent legacy content types that are candidates for conversion, as well as the required effort and efficiency of each conversion process. The paper concludes with best practices and lessons learned so that the reader can implement these content conversion practices in their own work.
Keywords
AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY (AR/VR),IMMERSIVE
Additional Keywords
Immersive Content Creation, Legacy Content Ingestion, Multi-modal Immersive Experience, Non-programmer Interface to Generate Content