Smart Makerspace: An Immersive Instructional Space for Physical Tasks

AbstractWe present the Smart Makerspace; a context-rich, immersive instructional workspace for novice and intermediate makers. The Smart Makerspace guides makers through the completion of a DIY task, while providing detailed contextually-relevant assistance, domain knowledge, tool location, usage cues, and safety advice. Through an initial exploratory study, we investigate the challenges faced in completing maker tasks. Our observations allow us to define design goals and a design space for a connected workshop. We describe our implementation, including a digital workbench, augmented toolbox, instrumented power-tools and environmentally aware audio. We present a qualitative user study that produced encouraging results; providing features that users unanimously found useful.