A Study on AR Authoring using Mobile Devices for Educators

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) on consumer devices is now commonplace and it finds application in areas like online retail and gaming. Among which, school education can especially benefit from the interactivity and expressiveness provided by AR technology, facilitating the learning process of students. Although AR-enabled hardware and applications are becoming increasingly accessible to both students and teachers, the entry requirement for AR authoring is still prohibitively high for school teachers. Given the vast variation in the learning ability of students and school curricula, an AR authoring tool that allows the rapid and easy creation of educational content seems to be very desirable among teachers. This paper proposes a gesture-based control method that satisfies the need of educational AR authoring and presents prototypes that work well with smartphone VR head mounts. Through user studies we show that our proposed control method is simple but effective for basic authoring tasks. Our prototypes are also found to be useful in teaching different concepts that require a high degree of spatial comprehension.