Abstract

Wire bending is a technique used in manufacturing to mass-produce. Wire bending machines like the DIWire by Pensalabs have made this process accessible for personal fabrication. However, such machines are controlled using Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software which is hard to use, making custom design challenging. We present Y-AR, a Computer Aided Design (CAD) interface for 3D wire bending. Y-AR uses mixed reality to let designers create structures that physically connect to objects in the environment. The interface incorporates springs as design primitives which (1) apply forces to hold objects, and (2) counter-act dimensional inaccuracies inherently caused by mid air modeling and measurement errors in AR. We demonstrate design workflows to design and fabricate a range of mechanisms designed in Y-AR as well as structures made using free-hand design tools. In our usability evaluation, all 12 participants successfully designed and fabricated a functional bottle holder with Y-AR. 10 out of 12 participants felt that the system aided their design process, rating it above 7 out of 10.

Citation

Acknowledgements

We thank the XR Collaboratory at Cornell Tech for their generous sponsorship of this research in the form of the inaugural XR Prototyping Grant.

Contact

If you have questions about this work, contact Shuo Feng at sf522 at cornell dot edu.