Which authoring tools to democratize augmented reality?

Summary

Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly being touted to support many societal disciplines, including art, science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine [1, 2, 3, 4]. However, creating educational AR activities is far from an easy task. From a technical point of view, programming AR applications requires advanced knowledge and skills in specialized libraries, such as Unity3d, Unrealengine, Vuforia, ARCore, Threejs, to name a few. This makes AR creation only accessible to a small group of people with advanced programming skills. Also, since existing AR toolkits are designed for general purposes,

Authortools_ _ [10] offer a new novel approach that can democratize AR by reducing technical barriers to AR content creation. AR authoring tools can provide users with means that allow them to create or modify AR artifacts without programming [11]. This is promising because non-programming people might be able to create activities using intuitive and easy-to-use interactions. For example, non-IT users can take a photo of an object, poster or book and add multimodal resources to it as virtual augmentations, such as texts, audio recordings, videos, images or 3D models. Nevertheless, the design and use of AR authoring tools are neglected.Several studies have raised difficulties in the creation and use of AR, such as the complexity of the technology, the difficulties of use, the lack of means of personalizing the user experience as well as the content, the unsuitability of the technology for the educational needs [9, 3, 5, 6, 11].

We therefore want to take a closer look at the design and use of AR authoring tools for non-IT users. We raise five open research questions for the workshop:

• • RQ1: What use case for AR authoring tools?

• • RQ2: Which HMIs for AR authoring tools?

• • RQ3: How to take into account individual differences in the design and use of AR authoring tools?

• • RQ4 What design principles for AR authoring tools? (eg, multimedia, contiguity, coherence, modality, personalization)

• • RQ5: What design and evaluation methods for AR authoring tools?

Call for participation

To participate in a workshop, it is mandatory to register on the IHM 2023 website:

• • Either register for the conference, the workshops are included in the registration

• • Either register for workshops only

Workshop format : Presentations, brainstorming and hands-on activities

We want the workshop to be inclusive and interactive. Participants can submit an abstract, poster, work in progress, presentation or article of their work. We hope to allocate time for all participants to present their work. All contributions around AR authoring tools are welcome. Currently, we are conducting several studies within the framework of the MIXAP project.

How to participate

1. 1. Send a note to the organizers stating your interest in presenting your work

1. 1. Submit an abstract, poster, work in progress, presentation or article of your work

Organizers

• • Mohamed Ez-zaouia, Le Mans University, LIUM, mohamed.ez-zaouia at univ-lemans.fr

• • Iza Marfisi-Schottman, Le Mans University, LIUM, iza.marfisi at univ-lemans.fr

• • Cendrine Elisabeth Mercier, Nantes University, CREN UR 2661, cendrine.mercier at univ-nantes.fr

Schedule of the day

1st Part, 9am – 12:30am 

• • Introduction, 9 am ~ 15 min  see slides  
  • Talk by Prof. Tsinakos, Kazanidis and Terzopoulos — Design and Use of ARTutor see slides
  • Talk by Assoc. Teacher. Iza Marfisi — Design and Use of MIXAP see slides
    
  • Talk by Ph.D., Alex Gabriel — XR Authoring for Manufacturing Training see slides
  • Talk by Prof. Fridolin Wild — ARETE, Designing Learning Experiences In AR see slides
  • Discussion

Part 2, 2 – 5h afternoon, hands-on activity

• • Paper prototyping an AR activity 
  • Creating an AR activity
  • Closing

Activity 1 : Think about and create a paper prototype of an augmented reality educational activity of your choice. For example, an activity to teach a concept in HMI.

We will provide participants with a kit ( worksheets and markers) for prototyping on paper.

lunch break

 

Closing of the workshop — 15 to 30 minutes

References:

[1] A. Dengel, MZ Iqbal, S. Grafe, and E. Mangina. “A Review on Augmented Reality Authoring Toolkits for Education”. In: Frontiers in Virtual Reality 3 (2022)
[2] D. Roopa, R. Prabha, and G. Senthil. “Revolutionizing education system with interactive augmented reality for quality education”. in. In: Materials Today: Proceedings 46 (2021), pp. 3860–3863
[3] M.-B. Ibáñez and C. Delgado-Kloos. “Augmented reality for STEM learning: A systematic review”. in. In: Computers & Education 123 (Aug. 2018), p. 109–12
[4] F. Arici, P. Yildirim, Ş. Caliklar, and RM Yilmaz.“Research trends in the use of augmented reality in science education: Content and bibliometric mapping analysis”. in. In: Computers & Education 142 (Dec. 2019), p. 103647
[5] M. Akçayır and G. Akçayır. “Advantages and challenges associated with augmented reality for education: A systematic review of the literature”. in. In: Educational Research Review 20 (Feb. 2017), p. 1–11.
[7] K. Yang, X. Zhou, and I. Radu. XR-Ed Framework: Designing Instruction-driven and Learner-centered Extended Reality Systems for Education. arXiv:2010.13779 [cs]. Oct. 202
[6] J. Garzón, Kinshuk, S. Baldiris, J. Gutiérrez, and J. Pavon.“How do pedagogical approaches affect the impact of augmented reality on education? A meta-analysis and research synthesis”. in. In: Educational Research
Review 31 (Nov. 2020), p. 100334
[8] M. Nebeling and M. Speicher. “The Trouble with Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Authoring Tools”. in. In: 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct). Oct. 2018, p. 333–337
[9] I. Radu. “Augmented reality in education: a meta-review and cross-media analysis” en. In: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 18.6 (Aug. 2014), pp. 1533–1543
[10] Cypher, Allen, et al.No code required: giving users tools to transform the web. Morgan Kaufman, 2010.
[11] M. Ez-zaouia, I. Marfisi-Schottman, M. Oueslati, C. Mercier, A. Karoui, and S. George. Design space of educational authoring tools for augmented reality. In Proceedings of the 11th Games and Learning Alliance Conference, LNCS ’22. Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science, 2022