PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Augmented Reality (AR) has great potential for assistance, training, educational, and prototyping purposes. This is already well established through the scientific literature of the past two decades. Now, suitable hardware is increasingly available, novel network protocols make location-independent usage possible, and exemplary AR use cases are increasingly explored and evaluated by researchers and industry alike. One challenge remaining for AR's widespread adoption is the creation of AR content to utilize this infrastructure and available hardware at scale. As the majority of current AR content, developed through conventional development methods, does not scale appropriately, it is important to enable users themselves to create their own AR content. Ideally, this would utilize ideas, benefits, and insights gained from these specific exemplary AR use cases and make the learnings widely available, comprehensible, and applicable by non-programmers.

As the overall inquiry, this thesis contributes towards filling this gap by systematically establishing the design space of AR authoring tools and then exploring it with the creation of a novel AR authoring tool for the creation of handheld AR procedural trainings. Hereby, it deliberately draws upon real learnings from first developing AR trainings in the same context, the conventional way. To accomplish this overall inquiry, the thesis is split into three major parts:

In the first part, a comprehensive systematic scoping review of all research publications contributing AR authoring tools published between 2000 and 2020 is presented. The 293 articles included in this systematic review are then mapped onto 26 dimensions, and a literature map of AR authoring tools is contributed. Furthermore, the current scopes and gaps of efforts in the field of AR authoring tools are elaborated. Afterward, a first proposal of the design space of AR authoring tools is contributed and discussed based on this systematically established literature map.

In the second part, a detailed account of the conventional development process for complex procedural AR trainings and their evaluation is presented as a case study of developing, evaluating and publishing the Heb@AR App. This part describes the professional, didactic and technical development of the Heb@AR App from the Human-Computer-Interaction perspective and its evaluations in terms of usability, utility, and usefulness. It furthermore discusses these efforts contextualized in a vision of AR-based training and particularly the aspects of AR trainings scalability. It contributes the Heb@AR App itself as an Open Educational Resource that was implemented as a successful learning scenario, but in this also provides evidence that realistically scalable AR training concepts on handheld devices can elicit learning benefits.

In the third and finally part, the TrainAR authoring tool is contributed as an open-source framework based on exploring the previously established design space with learnings from the conventional development of the Heb@AR App. TrainAR is a holistic framework to create scalable procedural handheld AR trainings that enables the development of AR trainings without programming expertise, that includes a full documentation and was evaluated for the usefulness of the authoring tool and the created AR trainings holistically.