TrainAR: An Open-Source Visual Scripting-Based Authoring Tool for Procedural Mobile Augmented Reality Trainings

Abstract

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) is a promising technology for educational purposes. It allows for interactive, engaging, and spatially independent learning. While the didactic benefits of AR have been well studied in recent years and commodity smartphones already come with AR capabilities, concepts and tools for a scalable deployment of AR are still missing. The proposed solution TrainAR combines an interaction concept, a didactic framework and an authoring tool for procedural AR training applications for smartphones. The contribution of this paper is the open-source visual scripting-based authoring tool of TrainAR in the form of a Unity Editor extension. With this approach, TrainAR allows non-programmer domain experts to create (“author”) their own procedural AR trainings by offering a customized editor, while at any time programmers may decide to utilize Unity’s full capabilities. Furthermore, utility and usability evaluations of several already developed TrainAR trainings (combined n = 317) show that TrainAR trainings provide utility in several contexts and are usable by the target groups. A systematic usability evaluation of the TrainAR Authoring Tool (n = 30) shows that it would be usable by non-programmer domain experts, though the learning curve depends on the media competency of the authors.