Mobile Augmented Reality Platform Research Articles

Co2iAR: Co-located audio-visual enabled mobile collaborative industrial AR wiring harness assembly

Existing augmented reality (AR) assembly mainly provides visual instructions for operators from a first-person perspective, and it is hard to share individual working intents for co-located workers on the shop floor, especially for large-scale product assembly task that requires multiple operators working together. To bridge this gap for practical deployments, this paper proposes Co2iAR, a co-located audio-visual enabled mobile collaborative AR assembly. Firstly, according to the stereo visual-inertial fusion strategy, robust and accurate self-contained motion tracking is achieved for the resource-constrained mobile AR platform, followed by a co-located alignment from multiple mobile AR clients on the shop floor. Then, a lightweight text-aware network for online wiring harness character recognition is proposed, as well as the audio-based confirming strategy, enabling natural audio-visual interaction among co-located workers within a shared immersive workplace, which can also monitor the current wiring assembly status and activate the step-by-step tutorials automatically. The novelty of this work is focused on the deployment of audio-visual aware interaction using the same device that is being used to deploy the co-located collaborative AR work instructions, establishing shared operating intents among multiple co-located workers. Finally, comprehensive experiments are carried out on the collaborative performance among multiple AR clients, and results illustrate that the proposed Co2iAR can alleviate the cognitive load and achieve superior performance for the co-located AR assembly tasks, providing a more human-centric collaborative assembly performance.

Mobile Augmented Reality and Outdoor Education

This paper describes a research project that explored the use of mobile augmented reality combined with outdoor education in a Swedish primary school. Special attention was paid to mobile augmented reality (AR). Project documentation and communication were reviewed, three iterations of design and usability evaluations of the Minnesmark mobile AR platform was made. Observations and interviews were held with teachers and students. The results describe early experiments, and both the opportunities and challenges that faced the participating teachers. The opportunities included connecting the outdoor learning environment and the indoor learning environment, directing the students' focus, posing questions and affording actions, rendering symbols and timelines visible, providing a point of entry to the context and the narrative, and facilitating conceptualization. Challenges concerned how to make pedagogical use of the landscape, producing or choosing content, structuring processes, setting up student groups, and aligning activities and content with learning objectives. It is concluded that the teachers and the students used the mobile augmented reality to make places in the local environment, outside the classroom, the starting point to increase the authenticity of the teaching.

Design of a Mobile Augmented Reality Platform with Game-Based Learning Purposes

Augmented reality (AR) is an emergent technology that overlays virtual objects into the real environment. Lately, AR is gaining prominence in education because of its increasing affordability through computers or mobile technologies. In addition, research sustaining the benefits of AR to promote student’s engagement to learn is increasing every day. However, the literature identifies lack of studies about the use of AR in education, namely, studies focused on the development of AR games designed over specific learning objectives (game-based learning). This paper presents a mobile augmented reality platform with learning purposes. The platform includes a mobile application that consists of a location-based game targeted to promote learning about the universe. Furthermore, it includes a back-office that allows teachers to introduce information about celestial bodies and also develop a set of multiple-choice questions to assess student’s learning about the subject matters they teach. The mobile application provides the users with physical movement and social interaction in the real world, while playing the game and for this reason it is included in the pervasive games’ paradigm. Besides engaging the students to play the game, we argue that this platform may be used as a resource to be implemented in informal and formal learning environments.

Mobile augmented reality learning objects in higher education

Teachers and learners in all sectors of education continue to have access to a growing number of mobile augmented reality (AR) applications for the creation and implementation of mobile AR experiences and learning objects (LOs). In this study, affordances of mobile AR and LOs for higher education are investigated through the mobile AR platform HP Reveal. Digital trace data from publicly shared and published AR users’ LOs were examined to investigate affordances of AR technology in educational organisations and institutions and their potential implications in areas of higher education. For this purpose, a quantitative comparative analysis of system data and content from 632 AR LOs was conducted at two instances over a 2-year interval period. Each LO was thematically coded to determine multimodal functionalities and characteristics. Further thematic coding and categorisation revealed four emergent categories for affordances in higher education: learner interaction, collaboration, cultural exploration and digital storytelling. Results also revealed increases over time in the use of recorded and online video content and the use of three-dimensional (3D) characters for educational purposes. An examination of the affordances offered by the AR platform revealed opportunities for educators to explore further interactive and collaborative uses of AR with their learners for pedagogical purposes in higher education. This paper is part of the special collection Mobile Mixed Reality Enhanced Learning, edited by ThomCochrane, Fiona Smart, Helen Farley and Vickel Narayan. More papers from this collection can befound here.

Affordances in Mobile Augmented Reality Applications

This paper explores the affordances of augmented reality content in a mobile augmented reality application. A user study was conducted by performing a multi-camera video recording of seven think aloud sessions. The think aloud sessions consisted of individual users performing tasks, exploring and experiencing a mobile augmented reality (MAR) application we developed for the iOS platform named ARad. We discuss the instrumental affordances we observed when users interacted with augmented reality content, as well as more complex affordances rising from conventions from media content, AR and the traditional WIMP paradigm. We find that remediation of traditional newspaper content through the MAR medium can provide engaging, pleasing and exciting user experiences. However, the some of the content still suffers from being shoveled onto the MAR platform without adapting it properly. Finally, we discuss what content was most successfully mediated to the user and how the content impacts the user experience.

Mobile augmented reality for environmental monitoring

In response to dramatic changes in the environment, and supported by advances in wireless networking, pervasive sensor networks have become a common tool for environmental monitoring. However, tools for on-site visualization and interactive exploration of environmental data are still inadequate for domain experts. Current solutions are generally limited to tabular data, basic 2D plots, or standard 2D GIS tools designed for the desktop and not adapted to mobile use. In this paper, we introduce a novel augmented reality platform for 3D mobile visualization of environmental data. Following a user-centered design approach, we analyze processes, tasks, and requirements of on-site visualization tools for environmental experts. We present our multilayer infrastructure and the mobile augmented reality platform that leverages visualization of georeferenced sensor measurement and simulation data in a seamless integrated view of the environment.

Wearable Personal Assistants for the Management of Historical Centers

One of the main tasks facing the manager of a historical centre is to avoid degradation while retaining the historical value. For this reason, any intervention which takes place on the environment, should be carefully managed. Only when performing a proper diagnosis of the environment and its reality is possible to follow a high quality intervention. The integration of new information technologies has been crucial to the improvement of these processes providing new tools. Within the project called RASMAP, we have designed and implemented a mobile augmented reality platform based on a service oriented architecture. This project introduces the concept of Wearable Personal Assistant (WPA). WPA in the RASMAP platform represents an innovative wearable tool, which provides support to professionals in their daily activities (mechanical engineer, safety responsible person, diagnosis expert, etc.). This tool is based on augmented reality technologies, mobile devices and communication infrastructures. The development of the platform for the WPAs implies addressing several technological challenges: a) to overcome the limitations inherent in the mobile devices: speed, capacity of memory, capacity of storage, graphical features and others, b) to obtain tracking systems that they do not need to alter or to adapt the environment, c) to optimize for the transmission and reproduction of multimedia contents through wireless networks on mobile devices. In this article, we describe the RASMAP platform, as a basis for the development of WPA and the extension of its use for the management of historical centres. The quality and usefulness of the scientific-technological results provided by the WPA have been validated developing a demonstrator for the diagnosis of the conservation status of the historical centre of a small town in the Basque Country. The advantages to be gained by using WPA in the proposed scenario are among others: more efficient processes, improved communication between users, and local and distributed multimedia content records.