Building Owner Manual Assisted by Augmented Reality: A Case from Brazil
The building use, operation, and maintenance manual, also known as the building owner's manual (BOM) is a document that provides all the information necessary to help Brazilian home owners operate, maintain, and repair their buildings. However, such manuals are in most cases presented in textual format with sparse technical terms and references, and lack the necessary information as required by federal government standards. As a result, building owners often find it difficult to effectively use the manual or find specific content pertaining to the problem to be fixed. A potential remedy to this situation is to enhance the traditional building manual's format using augmented reality (AR) that promotes new forms of interaction between the user and the BOM. In a nutshell, AR enables the displaying of virtual (computer generated) graphics overlaid on views of the real environment. The specific objective of the research presented in this paper is, therefore, to create and assess new formats of BOM enriched by AR in order to promote its use. To this end, a survey was first conducted and a total of 27 BOM samples were collected from Brazilian construction companies. After a thorough content analysis, one of these manuals was selected and used in the prototype living augmented reality (LAR) application. A graphical software and a game platform are used to develop LAR that can be launched on tablet computers and smart glasses. LAR displays a step by step AR animation of a maintenance activity to the user. This paper presents results of the survey of BOM manuals currently practiced in Brazil, as well as a description and technical details of the preliminary LAR maintenance experiment.