Purpose: The purpose of this study is the use of 3D printing technology to perform maintenance on damaged parts on site. To maintain damaged parts, the user needs experience in the parts design and 3D printing technology. To help users who have little or no experience on 3D printing, a part library-based information retrieval and inspection framework was proposed to support the process of manufacturing replaceable parts using a 3D printer. Design/methodology/approach: To establish the framework, 3D printing-based maintenance procedure was first defined, comprising retrieval, manufacturing and inspection steps, while identifying the technical components required to perform the procedure. Once the technical components are identified, part library-based information retrieval and inspection framework was defined based on the technical components and the relationships between the components. For validation of the concept of the framework, prototype system is developed according to the proposed framework. Findings: The feasibility of the proposed framework is proved through maintenance experiments on gaskets and O-rings. Originality/value: The main contribution of this study is the proposal of the framework, which aims to support the maintenance of damaged parts for the user who has little or no experience in part design or does not know how to operate a 3D printer.

We propose a viewpoint-sharing method with reduced motion sickness in an object-based remote collaborative virtual environment (CVE). The method is designed with an assumption of asymmetric, object-based CVE where collaborators use non-homogeneous devices, such as immersive virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) and tablet-based augmented reality (AR), and simultaneously interact with 3D virtual objects. Therefore, collaborators interact with different interfaces such as virtual reality (VR) users relying on controllers for virtual locomotion and object manipulation, while AR users perform physical locomotion and multi-touch input for object manipulation. The proposed viewpoint-sharing method allows both users to observe and manipulate the objects in interest from the shared point of view, enabling participants to interact with the objects without the need for virtual/physical locomotion. While viewpoint-sharing, instead of changing point of view, the proposed method performs seamless object transformation to provide a shared point of view, reducing motion sickness and associated discomfort. From our user experiment, the viewpoint-share condition resulted in a 35.47% faster task completion time than the baseline condition which is without proposed viewpoint-sharing. The advantage of viewpoint-sharing regarding system usability was significant, while task workloads were similar in the baseline and viewpoint-sharing conditions. We expect that the proposed viewpoint-sharing method allows users to quickly, efficiently, and collaboratively communicate in an object-based CVE, and represents a step forward in the development of effective remote, asymmetric CVE.