AN EXPLORATION OF THE ACCESSIBLE CREATION OF TWINS FOR VIRTUAL INTERACTION

 Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Digital Twins (DT) are increasingly used in industry to integrate physical objects into digital ecosystems, enabling applications such as adaptive automation, extended reality (XR) learning and control, and realistic simulation. These tools promise to revolutionize the relationship between fabrication and its stakeholders, providing efficiency gains, improved training, more intuitive interfacing, and additional insight into the production process. However, creating these systems requires networking, programming, 3D modeling, and video editing expertise. As a result, their advantages are inaccessible for individuals, makerspaces, and small and medium-sized enterprises central to mass personal?ization. This thesis presents two systems that democratize access to these advanced tools and their benefits through virtual environments. The first is MakerVerse, built on top of a middleware that democratizes access to the advantages of CPS for common fabrication machines by leveraging W3C’s Web of Things standards. The middleware enables a codeless workflow to create heterogeneous CPS, synchronizes key properties of the physical system with its 3D model, and generates the XR UI elements required for monitoring and control. The second is a mixed-reality skill learning system capable of capturing and transferring intention and causality information of assembly tasks from experts to novices. A 48-person user study showed this system to be a more effective learning tool with shorter learning time and deeper comprehension of the tasks.