Content first - a concept for industrial augmented reality maintenance applications using mobile devices

Although AR has a long history in the area of maintenance and service-support in industry, there still is a lack of lightweight, yet practical solutions for handheld AR systems in everyday workflows. Attempts to support complex maintenance tasks with AR still miss reliable tracking techniques, simple ways to be integrated into existing maintenance environments, and practical authoring solutions, which minimize costs for specialized content generation. We present a general, customisable application framework, allowing to employ AR and VR techniques in order to support technicians in their daily tasks. In contrast to other systems, we do not aim to replace existing support systems such as traditional manuals. Instead we integrate well-known AR- and novel presentation techniques with existing instruction media. To this end practical authoring solutions are crucial and hence we present an application development system based on web-standards such as HTML, CSS and X3D.