An Authoring Tool for Mixed Reality Interfaces for Digital Twins in Manufacturing

Published

September 7, 2024

Author(s)

Aubrey Simonson, Guodong Shao

Abstract

While the concept of digital twins has a history of at least twenty years in length, the design of interfaces for digital twins is less well studied. Extended Reality (XR) interfaces show particular potential in this domain. Creating a custom XR interface for a digital twin requires the involvement of software engineers with diverse skill sets. This requirement is impractical for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Existing efforts to create XR interfaces for digital twins have been case studies designed for the specific use cases they were tested on. This paper introduces an authoring tool that addresses this challenge by allowing end users without programming expertise to create XR interfaces for digital twins without writing any code themselves. Our initial prototype demonstrates the ability to parse machine data formatted according to the MTConnect standard and provides menu-based interfaces and a sandbox of data visualizations to guide users through interpreting and displaying data.

Proceedings Title

The APMS 2024 Conference

Conference Dates

September 8-12, 2024

Conference Location

Chemnitz/Zwickau, DE

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71633-1_27

Local Download

Keywords

Digital Twin, Mixed Reality, Authoring Tool, User Interface, Data Visualization

Citation

Simonson, A. and Shao, G. (2024), An Authoring Tool for Mixed Reality Interfaces for Digital Twins in Manufacturing, The APMS 2024 Conference, Chemnitz/Zwickau, DE, [online], https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71633-1_27, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956577 (Accessed October 24, 2025)