BrickPal: Augmented Reality-based Assembly Instructions for Brick Models

TL;DR

BrickPal is an augmented reality system that provides interactive, real-time assembly guidance for brick models, improving usability and customization over traditional paper instructions.

Contribution

The paper introduces BrickPal, a novel AR-based system utilizing NLP to generate and visualize assembly instructions, enhancing user experience and flexibility.

Findings

BrickPal improves assembly efficiency compared to traditional methods.

NLP-generated sequences are as usable as manually created ones.

User study confirms effectiveness of AR guidance.

Abstract

The assembly instruction is a mandatory component of Lego-like brick sets.The conventional production of assembly instructions requires a considerable amount of manual fine-tuning, which is intractable for casual users and customized brick sets.Moreover, the traditional paper-based instructions lack expressiveness and interactivity.To tackle the two problems above, we present BrickPal, an augmented reality-based system, which visualizes assembly instructions in an augmented reality head-mounted display. It utilizes Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to generate plausible assembly sequences, and provide real-time guidance in the AR headset.Our user study demonstrates BrickPal's effectiveness at assisting users in brick assembly compared to traditional assembly methods. Additionally, the NLP algorithm-generated assembly sequences achieve the same usability with manually adapted sequences.