Augmented Silkscreen: Designing AR Interactions for Debugging Printed Circuit Boards

Ishan Chatterjee, Olga Khvan, Tadeusz Pforte, Richard Li, Shwetak Patel

We work with electrical engineers to design augmented reality tools that make printed circuit board debugging more natural, efficient, and reliable.

Abstract

Debugging printed circuit boards (PCBs) requires frequent context switching and spatial pattern matching between software design files and physical boards. To reduce this overhead, we conduct a series of interviews with electrical engineers to understand their workflows, around which we design a set of AR interaction techniques, we call Augmented Silkscreen, to streamline identification, localization, annotation, and measurement tasks. We then run a set of remote user studies with illustrative video sketches and simulated PCB tasks to compare our interactions with current practices, finding that our techniques reduce completion times. Based on these quantitative results, as well as qualitative feedback from our participants, we offer design recommendations for the implementation of these interactions on a future, deployable AR system.