Empowering Users to Create Augmented Reality-Based Solutions – Deriving Design Principles for No-Code AR Authoring Tools

Grounded on an experimental study with 18 participants, we derive 15 design principles for no-code AR authoring tools in an organizational setting. The study consists of two distinct treatments that aim to augment lightweight processes with AR. The outcomes are two interactive tutorials utilizing AR instructions. Following the no-code approach, the participants were empowered to create relevant AR content using a reduced interface and no need for advanced configurations or coding. The study thus combines two research streams with the aim of better understanding mechanisms for AR use in a professional context. As prior work has shown, despite the potential benefits, the adoption of AR authoring tools is limited because ramping up AR to productive use is heavily dependent on consulting and custom software solutions. Our novel approach bears the potential to broaden application domains and empower professionals to apply AR

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Enabling Non-Professional Users To Bring Physical Processes Into The Industrial Metaverse

Augmented reality is essential for the Metaverse because, with this technology, people, spaces, and things can be digitally and physically intertwined. But the creation of AR content is a very complex process carried out by technically skilled developers. For the Metaverse, it is necessary to enable non-professional users to create AR content. We, therefore, want to study the challenges that non-professional users face while creating AR content for process guidance systems that represents a physical process. For this reason, we conducted an exploratory analysis using ten AR authoring experts and arranged a focus group with domain experts and AR authoring experts. As a result, we identified four fundamental design requirements on how an AR authoring tool must be designed to bring physical processes into the Metaverse. Thus, we contribute to understanding AR-based process guidance systems and enable the instantiation and evaluation of an AR authoring tool in large DSR project

Block-Based Development of Mobile Learning Experiences for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things enables experts of given domains to create smart user experiences for interacting with the environment. However, development of such experiences requires strong programming skills, which are challenging to develop for non-technical users. This paper presents several extensions to the block-based programming language used in App Inventor to make the creation of mobile apps for smart learning experiences less challenging. Such apps are used to process and graphically represent data streams from sensors by applying map-reduce operations. A workshop with students without previous experience with Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile app programming was conducted to evaluate the propositions. As a result, students were able to create small IoT apps that ingest, process and visually represent data in a simpler form as using App Inventor's standard features. Besides, an experimental study was carried out in a mobile app development course with academics of diverse disciplines. Results showed it was faster and easier for novice programmers to develop the proposed app using new stream processing blocks.Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) - ERDF fund