Designing mobile augmented reality art applications:addressing the views of the galleries and the artists

The utilization of mobile augmented reality to display gallery artworks or museum content in novel ways is a well-established concept in the augmented reality research community. However, the focus of these systems is generally technologically driven or only addresses the end user and not the views of the gallery or the original artist. In this paper we discuss the design and development of the mobile application ?Taking the Artwork Home?, which allows people to digitally curate their own augmented reality art exhibitions in their own homes by digitally ?replacing? the pictures they have on their walls with content from the Peter Scott Gallery in Lancaster. In particular, we present the insights gained from a research through design methodology that allowed us to consider how the views of the gallery and artists impacted on the system design and therefore the user experience. Thus the final artifact is the result of an iterative evaluation process with over 100 users representing a broad range of demographics and continues to be evaluated/enhanced by observing its operation ?in the wild?. Further, we consider the effect the project has had on gallery practices to enable both augmented reality designers, and galleries and museums to maximize the potential application of the technology when working together on such project

Virtual and Real World in Mobile Reality

Technology in education has impacted many ways in student's life to learn enthusiastically by giving better and more than expected results. Some research stated that technology will create a passive process if it doesn't promote critical thinking. To support the statement Augmented Reality (AR) has shown the best potential to make learning more interactive and easy. It's because of the feature of AR that lets us interact with things in virtual and real-time. Therefore this paper represents the idea of using AR in education

Designing Mobile Augmented Reality interfaces for locative games and playful experiences

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) has predominantly been used in locative games and playful experiences for the presentation on virtual game objects in conjunction with separate 2-D maps for navigation. This distinct switch in interaction modalities can detract from the game play experience and will arguably be less relevant for AR glasses. Therefore this research considers the application techniques from graphic design to MAR interfaces to provide an effective means of navigation through a physical game space without maps. To illustrate this approach we present a MAR application that provides a playful way for visitors to explore a small rural village in both space and time in relation to its main cultural event, the annual Scarecrow Festival. In particular we present the considerations that designers must address when creating purely augmented reality navigation interfaces through the design, implementation, and user evaluation of the application scARecrow Time Machine

Handheld AR for Collaborative Edutainment

Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) is expected to provide ergonomic, intuitive user interfaces for untrained users. Yet no comparative study has evaluated these assumptions against more traditional user interfaces for an education task. In this paper we compare the suitability of a handheld AR arts-history learning game against more traditional variants. We present results from a user study that demonstrate not only the effectiveness of AR for untrained users but also its fun-factor and suitability in environments such as public museums. Based on these results we provide design guidelines that can inform the design of future collaborative handheld AR applications

Augmented Reality Model for Pre-School Learning

Science subject is very important to create scientific knowledge among students. In Malaysia, the implementation of the Science Curriculum is normally done via conventional approach. However, this approach is not able to attract students’ interests in exploring more knowledge. In addition, the students only acquire the basic knowledge without being able to visualize the subject matters. Thus, this study is aimed to apply Augmented Reality (AR) technology in teaching and learning of the Basic Science subject to overcome the issues. AR is the augmentation of the real world through the addition of three-dimensional (3D) virtual objects. AR has been proven as an effective method in delivering lessons to the students compared to conventional method. This study applied AR in preschool Basic Science subject that focused on the internal organ of human body known as the Muscular System. This study adapted AR with Experiential Learning Model (ELM) theory to construct the requirement model of the Augmented Reality for Learning in Muscular System (ARMS). The proposed model consisted of three (3) main components; i) Requirement to Implement AR in a Classroom (R-IARC), ii) High-Level Prototyping (HLP), and iii) Experiential Learning Model (ELM). The methodology in this study involved five (5) main phases; i) theoretical study, ii) preliminary study, iii) requirement model construction, iv) ARMS development, v) model evaluation by users and experts respectively. The requirement of the proposed model was collected using multiple facts finding techniques, namely interview, observation, and document reviews. The proposed model was validated using prototyping approach. The evaluation of the prototype was done by expert reviews and end-user acceptance study. The results of the evaluation showed that the ARMS was highly effective to be implemented in the teaching and learning of Basic Science subject. This is because it assists in explaining difficult topics. In addition, it has also been proven that the integration of the AR technology in teaching and learning is able to create an enjoyable environment because it is supported by the visualization of 3D virtual objects. As a result, the students were able to understand and recognize the functions, health, and diseases of the muscular system through ARMS. The study also found that the implementation of ARMS was able to increase the students’ cognitive development and enhance the students’ learning ability

An Inertial Device-based User Interaction with Occlusion-free Object Handling in a Handheld Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology used to merge virtual objects with real environments in real-time. In AR, the interaction which occurs between the end-user and the AR system has always been the frequently discussed topic. In addition, handheld AR is a new approach in which it delivers enriched 3D virtual objects when a user looks through the device’s video camera. One of the most accepted handheld devices nowadays is the smartphones which are equipped with powerful processors and cameras for capturing still images and video with a range of sensors capable of tracking location, orientation and motion of the user. These modern smartphones offer a sophisticated platform for implementing handheld AR applications. However, handheld display provides interface with the interaction metaphors which are developed with head-mounted display attached along and it might restrict with hardware which is inappropriate for handheld. Therefore, this paper will discuss a proposed real-time inertial device-based interaction technique for 3D object manipulation. It also explains the methods used such for selection, holding, translation and rotation. It aims to improve the limitation in 3D object manipulation when a user can hold the device with both hands without requiring the need to stretch out one hand to manipulate the 3D object. This paper will also recap of previous works in the field of AR and handheld AR. Finally, the paper provides the experimental results to offer new metaphors to manipulate the 3D objects using handheld devices

A Framework for Research in Gamified Mobile Guide Applications using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs)

Mobile Guides are mobile applications that provide players with local and location-based services (LBS), such as navigation assistance, where and when they need them most. Advances in mobile technologies in recent years have enabled the gamification of these applications, opening up new opportunities to transfer education and culture through game play. However, adding traditional game elements such as PBLs (points, badges, and leaderboards) alone cannot ensure that the intended learning outcomes will be met, as the player’s cognitive resources are shared between the application and the surrounding environment. This distribution of resources prevents players from easily immersing themselves into the educational scenario. Adding artificial conversational characters (ECAs) that simulate the social norms found in real-life human-to-human guide scenarios has the potential to address this problem and improve the player’s experience and learning of cultural narratives [1]. Although significant progress has been made towards creating game-like mobile guides with ECAs ([2], [3]), there is still a lack of a unified framework that enables researchers and practitioners to investigate the potential effects of such applications to players and how to approach the concepts of player experience, cognitive accessibility and usability in this context. This paper presents a theoretically-well supported research framework consisted of four key components: differences in players, different features of the gamified task, aspects of how the ECA looks, sound or behaves and different mobile environments. Furthermore, it provides based on this framework a working definition of what player experience, cognitive accessibility and usability are in the context of game-like mobile guide applications. Finally, a synthesis of the results of six empirical studies conducted within this research framework is discussed and a series of design guidelines for the effective gamification of mobile guide applications using ECAs are presented. Results show that an ECA can positively affect the quality of the player’s experience, but it did not elicit better player retention of cultural narratives and navigation of routes

3D Medical Collaboration Technology to Enhance Emergency Healthcare

Two-dimensional (2D) videoconferencing has been explored widely in the past 15–20 years to support collaboration in healthcare. Two issues that arise in most evaluations of 2D videoconferencing in telemedicine are the difficulty obtaining optimal camera views and poor depth perception. To address these problems, we are exploring the use of a small array of cameras to reconstruct dynamic three-dimensional (3D) views of a remote environment and of events taking place within. The 3D views could be sent across wired or wireless networks to remote healthcare professionals equipped with fixed displays or with mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs). The remote professionals’ viewpoints could be specified manually or automatically (continuously) via user head or PDA tracking, giving the remote viewers head-slaved or hand-slaved virtual cameras for monoscopic or stereoscopic viewing of the dynamic reconstructions. We call this idea remote 3D medical collaboration. In this article we motivate and explain the vision for 3D medical collaboration technology; we describe the relevant computer vision, computer graphics, display, and networking research; we present a proof-of-concept prototype system; and we present evaluation results supporting the general hypothesis that 3D remote medical collaboration technology could offer benefits over conventional 2D videoconferencing in emergency healthcare

A deep reinforcement learning-based offloading scheme for multi-access edge computing-supported eXtended reality systems

In recent years, eXtended Reality (XR) applications have been widely employed in various scenarios, e.g., health care, education, manufacturing, etc. Such application are now easily accessible via mobile phones, tablets, or wearable devices. However, such devices normally suffer from constraints in terms of battery capacity and processing power, limiting the range of applications supported or lowering Quality of Experience. One effective way to address these issues is to offload the computation tasks to the edge servers that are deployed at the network edges, e.g., base stations or WiFi access point, etc. This communication fashion, also named as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), is proposed to overcome the limitations in terms of long latency due to long propagation distance of traditional cloud computing approach. XR devices, that are limited in computation resources and energy, can then benefit from offloading the computation intensive tasks to MEC servers. However, as XR applications are comprised of multiple tasks with variety of requirements in terms of latency and energy consumption, it is important to make decision whether one task should be offloaded to MEC server or not. This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning-based offloading scheme for XR devices (DRLXR). The proposed scheme is used to train and derive the close-to optimal offloading decision whereas optimizing a utility function optimization equation that considers both energy consumption and execution delay at XR devices. The simulation results show how our proposed scheme outperforms the other counterparts in terms of total execution latency and energy consumption