Development of a flexible augmented prototyping system

In designing physical objects, tangible models play an important part. Recent advances in augmented reality displays show new directions to support this field of prototyping. This paper focuses on the combination of rapid prototyping of physical objects and luminous tangible interfaces: digital imagery is projected on physical models. This yields a number of issues, including the design of the mixed-reality dialogue and the perceived quality of the augmented prototype. A system, called WARP (Workbench for Augmented Rapid Prototyping) is under development; the first implementation employs a turntable supports movement of the object, while a variety of materials and lighting conditions can be applied. Its evaluation yields a number of future issues, including hybrid modeling and optics and location tracking