Tradition of craftsmanship through computer augmented tools

There is a problem that many old people's experience, skills, and craftsmanship will not pass the tradition down from generation to generation. In this paper, we propose a system which allows extracting the experts' craftsmanship and passing them to the novices, using tangible user interface approach and the augmented reality approach. Our system stores both implicit and explicit knowledge of the experts. The tools involved in this system are augmented by the RF-ID and various kinds of sensors, and they detect the knacks of the experts to perform the task, such as their procedures to achieve the goal smoothly, the manipulating way of each tool, their tool selections to suit for each operation and each situation, and so on. These tools allow preserving experts' craftsmanship directly on themselves through the experts' usual activities. When novices are using the tools to perform a task, the advices to improve their operations are appeared on the physical workspace by being directly overlaid on the physical tools in real time, comparing the current operations to the experts' ones. We also conducted the experiments to evaluate our system and the results showed this system works well to achieve our objectives