CAD Assembly in Augmented Reality

It is fairly simple to accidentally design an assembly in CAD that cannot be built. Matthew Beaudouin-Lafon and myself, under the supervision of Scott Harris, used a zSpace (https://zspace.com/) and Unity (https://unity3d.com/) to build a proof of concept application that allows the user to virtually build an assembly. This means that parts don’t need to be ordered or manufactured before being completely confident that the design can be assembled.

Future work incules:

Implementing an efficient collider. This is critical for the application to actually be useful. We had done lots of work in this area but ran into trouble trying to make a generalized non-convex collider with minimal impact on overall performance.
Adding tools such as screwdrivers or wrenches. This would ensure that fasteners can be accessed and have the room to fasten.
Automatically generate an instruction set from an assembly session.