Comparing virtual and location-based augmented reality mobile learning: emotions and learning outcomes

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications allow the user to interact with virtual objects positioned within the real world via a smart phone, tablet or smart glasses. As the popularity of these applications grows, recent researchers have identified several security and privacy issues pertaining to the collection and storage of sensitive data from device sensors. Location-based AR applications typically not only collect user location data, but transmit it to a remote server in order to download nearby virtual content. In this paper we show that the pattern of network traffic generated by this process alone can be used to infer the user's location. We demonstrate a side-channel attack against a widely available Mobile AR application inspired by Website Fingerprinting methods. Through the strategic placement of virtual content and prerecording of the network traffic produced by interacting with this content, we are able to identify the location of a user within the target area with an accuracy of 94%. This finding reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the implementation of Mobile AR applications and we offer several recommendations to mitigate this threat.

Recently, augmented reality technologies are debuting to the mainstream markets. Currently, smartphones are still the dominant computing platform for providing mobile augmented reality (MAR) experience to users. Nevertheless, MAR on smartphones faces some key challenges as the rich functionalities increase concerns including battery power drain and thermal dissipation. This paper takes the first step to understand the characteristics of MAR apps from the system and architecture perspectives. We observe that MAR apps exhibit much higher Thread-level Parallelism (TLP) and have a potential to better exploit the big.LITTLE architecture. We further build Multi-comPonent Power and Thermal Analysis Tool (MPPTAT) on Android mobile platform to break down the power consumption and thermal dissipation into hardware components, threads, and phases. Power characterization shows that MAR apps exhibit higher energy consumption compared to other popular mobile non-MAR apps, mainly contributed by the camera. Thread level breakdown shows that the major CPU power consumption is MediaServer, which controls the camera to capture and process multimedia information on smartphones. We also investigate the impact of DVFS, and results indicate that current MAR apps' implementations are mostly CPU intensive and the mobile GPU is not well exploited yet. Moreover, thermal characterization shows that compared to the non-MAR apps, the frequent usage of the camera not only increases the temperature of the camera module but also dissipates the heat to other layers, which directly affect user experience. We believe that our work reveals insights for software and hardware designers to fine-tune augmented reality workloads on mobile platforms.

The flipped classroom model enables students to acquire fundamental knowledge outside of class time; thus, include reading materials or video lectures. This will be able to free up class time for knowledge application, student engagement in active learning, and higher-order thinking. The flipped classroom model is increasingly being adopted in competency-based medical education. However, the potential of flipped classrooms for enhancing medical education has not yet been proven and it poses a major challenge to students who have not mastered self-regulated learning strategies. Thus, they may not be able to understand the information presented in the course materials or to strategically use learning resources outside of class. In this project, we have created a mobile augmented reality (AR) application for students studying anatomy to help them grasp the idea of the AR flipped classroom. Students were instructed to use the same three mobile augmented reality (MAR) applications with different design and approach. The three types of MAR applications are — those with markers and notes on printed notebooks (BARA1), those with markers and notes are on a website (BARA2), and those with all notes in the MAR application and the marker are a tangible 3D object (BARA3). From the series of experiment, we found out that most students favour the BARA3, meanwhile the medical lecturers essentially prefer the BARA1. In this research three things have been considered: interface design, the usefulness of Augmented Reality (AR), technical problems with the use of AR applications, and educators training on the use of AR applications. Without a well-designed interface and guidance for the students, AR technology can be too complicated to use, especially for those who are not familiar with the technology.

With the development of Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore, mobile augmented reality (AR) applications have become much more popular. For Android devices, ARCore provides basic motion tracking and environmental understanding. However, with current software frameworks it can be difficult to create an AR application from the ground up. Our solution is CalAR, which is a lightweight, open-source software environment to develop AR applications for Android devices, while giving the programmer full control over the phone’s resources. With CalAR, the programmer can create marker-less AR applications which run at 60 frames per second on Android smartphones. These applications can include more complex environment understanding, physical simulation, user interaction with virtual objects, and interaction between virtual objects and objects in the physical environment. With CalAR being based on CalVR, which is our multi-platform virtual reality software engine, it is possible to port CalVR applications to an AR environment on Android phones with minimal effort. We demonstrate this with the example of a spatial visualization application.

The purpose of the current study is to design and develop a sample Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) application addressing the anatomic structure of the heart in a way suitable for laboratory learning for pre-service science teachers to achieve learning by constructing information in biology instruction. The implementation of the MAR design activity was conducted with the participation of 30 pre-service teachers taking the biology laboratory course. The implementation process of the activity consists of four stages. The first stage includes the introduction of the MAR application program and marker; the second stage includes the use of the MAR application in a laboratory environment; the third stage includes the operation of dissection and the last stage includes the association of the MAR application with the operation of dissection and general evaluation. Then, semi-structured interviews were conducted by involving pre-service teachers and the data obtained from these interviews revealed that integration of heart dissection with MAR application helped the pre-service teachers to better understand the anatomic structure of the heart and the related concepts. Thus, a sample activity demonstrating how MAR, which is an instructional method with strong potential for reification and visualisation, can be integrated into the teaching of concepts in laboratory settings was developed.

The world of mobile computing has been advancing at a tremendous rate over the past numbers of years and is set to continue well in the future. The vast majority of interaction between the user and mobile of today makes use of touch screen displays that have now become the de-facto standard in all smart phones. This paper presents a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) application making use of different kinds of interaction techniques to investigate user experience and the usefulness of the AR technology. Comparisons are drawn with a ported version of the application that makes use of the more traditional touch screen interaction paradigm (2D), thus allowing users to accurately gauge their interaction style preference. The application also makes use of finger-based gesture, auditory (3D sound) and haptic based feedback to ground the user and create a richer experience. Our results shows that though the user feels that 2D interaction is easy to use, they find that using gesture based AR interaction is more fun and enjoyable in this mobile AR application.

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology in mobile app design during recent years. However, usability challenges in these apps are prominent. There are currently no established guidelines for designing and evaluating interactions in AR as there are in traditional user interfaces. In this work, we aimed to examine the usability of current mobile AR applications and interpreting classic usability heuristics in the context of mobile AR. Particularly, we focused on AR home design apps because of their popularity and ability to incorporate important mobile AR interaction schemas. Our findings indicated that it is important for the designers to consider the unfamiliarity of AR technology to the vast users and to take technological limitations into consideration when designing mobile AR apps. Our work serves as a first step for establishing more general heuristics and guidelines for mobile AR.

Lately, mobile augmented reality (AR) has become very popular and is used for many commercial and product promotional activities. However, in almost all mobile AR applications, the user only views annotated information or the preset motion of the virtual object in an AR environment and is unable to interact with the virtual objects as if he/she were interacting with real objects in the real environment. In this paper, in an attempt to realize enhanced intuitive and realistic object manipulation in the mobile AR environment, we propose an integrated view-input AR interaction method, which integrates user device manipulation and virtual object manipulation. The method enables the user to hold a 3D virtual object by touching the displayed object on the 2D touch screen of a mobile device, and to move and rotate the object by moving and rotating the mobile device while viewing the held object by way of the 2D screen of the mobile device. Based on this concept, we implemented three types of integrated methods, namely the Rod, Center, and Touch methods, and conducted a user study to investigate the baseline performance metrics of the proposed method on an AR object manipulation task. The Rod method achieved the highest success rate (91%). Participants' feedback indicated that this is because the Rod method is the most natural, and evoked a fixed mental model that is conceivable in the real environment. These results indicated that visualizing the manipulation point on the screen and restricting the user's interactivity with virtual objects from the user's position of view based on a conceivable mental model would be able to aid the user to achieve precise manipulation.

This study explores the integration of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications within the context of the National Museum of Malaysia, focusing on enhancing the educational experience for visitors. The project aims to address the challenge of enhancing museum experiences through innovative technologies. The research problem centers on designing an AR application for the National Museum of Malaysia to enrich the visitor engagement and understanding, as stemmed from the decline in museum visitors, with the National Museum of Malaysia experiencing a staggering 70% drop in income in 2020 and 2021. Utilizing Unity Editor and other libraries, the project developed the National Museum AR App, featuring four distinct AR experiences corresponding to different exhibits within the museum. Methods involve AR content creation, user testing, and data analysis. Overall, findings suggest that the AR application effectively meets visitors' learning needs and enhances the educational value of museum exhibits by providing unique AR features. The significance of the project lies in its potential to transform cultural heritage tourism by bridging the gap between traditional museum experiences and digital engagement. The study also serves as a preliminary investigation to guide the future development and deployment of AR applications within the museum setting.

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.

Approximately 1 in 160 children worldwide is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD prevalence is on the rise in the United States. Virtual reality (VR) techniques have been tried in several studies to improve the shopping skills of people with ASD. However, in these VR applications, the effectiveness in training people with ASD in shopping has never been tested in the real-world environments. Our studies show that individuals with ASD become anxious when exposed to a new environment such as a supermarket, without knowing what to do next. Also, VR applications are less accessible, portable, or affordable compared to the emerging mobile augmented reality (AR) applications. Therefore, we have created a mobile AR application that augments real shopping scenes with visual-audio annotations via object recognition, barcode reading, and automatic categorization. Through a user-friendly visual interface, the app can help people with ASD learn shopping skills effectively, by guiding them through the shopping process step by step in a real environment with AR. A short YouTube demo video of ParaShop can be found at https://youtu.be/77tp3julNZ0.

In traditional learning, students frequently need help mastering mathematical concepts due to the complexity of the content and static and non-interactive teaching methods. However, the ubiquity of mobile phones and their enabling impact on Augmented Reality (AR) technology improves learning experiences. Augmented Reality (AR) specifically fosters spatial thinking through visual augmentations and enables interactions with dynamic content. In this paper, we propose a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) learning system that utilizes these visual augmentations to present educational hints of different textual- and graphical types. The system considers teachers’ and students’ perspectives and provides respective interfaces. These interfaces are a web-based authoring tool for teachers and a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) application for students. We conclude our work with ideas for future Augmented Reality (AR)-based learning systems.

The purpose of this article was to evaluate the effectiveness of using mobile augmented reality (AR) instructional material for Year 10 science students in a secondary school in Brunei Darussalam. Specific learning styles were identified for the control and the experimental groups. A mobile AR application of instructional material was developed for year 10 chemistry lesson focusing on redox reaction using Vuforia SDK and Unity3d. The material developed consisted of visual, audio and kinesthetic elements of learning modalities which aimed to stimulate students' interest and improve their learning ability. The t-test (t = -3.39) in the posttest indicate d a significant result (p = 0.00152) between the mean scores of the experimental (mean = 42.72) and control (mean = 26.36) groups. The result showed that the intervention of classroom lessons introduced by the mobile AR application had a significant positive impact on the learning outcome and supported the idea that AR can be a valuable teaching tool. Qualitative analysis also indicated that it improved the liveliness of the learning environment and the interaction amongst the students.

The boom in the capabilities and features of mobile devices, like smartphones, tablets, and wearables, combined with the ubiquitous and affordable Internet access and the advances in the areas of cooperative networking, computer vision, and mobile cloud computing transformed mobile augmented reality (MAR) from science fiction to a reality. Although mobile devices are more constrained computationalwise from traditional computers, they have a multitude of sensors that can be used to the development of more sophisticated MAR applications and can be assisted from remote servers for the execution of their intensive parts. In this paper, after introducing the reader to the basics of MAR, we present a categorization of the application fields together with some representative examples. Next, we introduce the reader to the user interface and experience in MAR applications and continue with the core system components of the MAR systems. After that, we discuss advances in tracking and registration, since their functionality is crucial to any MAR application and the network connectivity of the devices that run MAR applications together with its importance to the performance of the application. We continue with the importance of data management in MAR systems and the systems performance and sustainability, and before we conclude this survey, we present existing challenging problems.

An end-use’s experience of any software is typically influenced by the interface presented by the application to the user. For Mixed Reality Environments such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, the user interface is highly visual, and a poor interface can significantly degrade the user experience. Adequate attention is required when designing or creating interfaces and user experience within Mixed Reality Environments as traditional interface design goals and specifications often need to be adjusted. Furthermore, for mixed reality environments on Mobile devices there are additional interface constraints and considerations that would considerably improve the user experience when properly addressed. This research paper discusses the evolution(s) of user interface(s) and user experience of Augmented and Virtual Reality applications on Mobile devices and contributes a framework for improving user interfaces and experience when using Mixed Reality Environments.