Augmented Reality#

Estimated time to read: 5 minutes

Augmented Reality enables any task relevant information available inside MES to be viewed over a live camera shot of the real product, process, line or facility area. This means you have faster and simpler shop floor visibility and monitoring, and an improved operational efficiency.

This tutorial will guide you through the setup and usage of the Augmented Reality functionality.

Overview#

Augmented Reality is a mechanism to superimpose information on top of an object, as viewed through a device camera, for the purposes of visualization or interaction.

The Augmented Reality feature works by identifying QR codes in the image being captured by the camera of the mobile devices, and looking up the respective configuration in the system about the object associated with that QR code. The registration of QR codes and objects is done via Tags.

Setting Up Augmented Reality#

To be able to use the Augmented Reality feature it is necessary to follow the steps described in the table below:

Table: Augmented Reality Setup steps

The individual steps are explained in more detail in the sub-sections that follow.

Create the Necessary UI Pages#

UI Pages used in Augmented Reality are normal UI Pages, but the Augmented Reality module automatically supplies some parameters to the UI Page when an object is recognized. These parameters are listed in Table 2 below:

Table: Augmented Reality UI Page parameters

An example of this type of UI page is shown below:

The parameters can then be supplied to any UI Page widget. In the image below, the three parameters are passed to an Entity History widget. In the case of the EntityInstance, the converter that is used is the anyToAnyProperty without any Converter Parameter.

Create the Augmented Reality Tags#

Augmented Reality Tags are created in the Administration menu, Augmented Reality entity. For more information, see the Augmented Reality (Administration) and Augmented Reality (System Widgets/) sections of the User Guide.

Using Augmented Reality#

Augmented Reality can also be accessed from the Manufacturing menu, Augmented Reality entity.

To use the Augmented Reality point the camera at the pre-defined QR codes. The system will automatically display either the standard tile or the pre-defined UI Page when the object is recognized.

The following images show the example defined above to display the history of an object.

Using Augmented Reality as a Widget#

Augmented Reality can also be used as a Widget. In this case it leverages the same Augmented Reality Configuration. The example below uses an Augmented Reality Widget to feed an Entity History Widget.

In this example, the Widget is linked with the properties LastTag, LastEntityType, and LastEntityInstance as seen in the image below:

The Augmented Reality Widget provides five parameters as described in the next table:

Table: Augmented Reality widget output properties

The objects entityTagLost and entityTagFound contain the list of properties shown in the Augmented Reality UI Page parameters table. These properties can be accessed by using the anyToAnyProperty converter and supplying as the ConverterParameter the name of the property. Typically, the ConverterParameters would be a static property like the UI Page. This process is described in the image below:

Table: entityTagFound or entityTagLost object properties