Providing Examples and Tool Support for Novice AR Creators

Abstract

The recent democratization of AR development with the availability of ARKit and ARCore has lowered its barrier to entry for seasoned mobile and game developers. However, learning AR development still poses significant challenges to creators with limited development experience, let alone novice programmers. This paper surveys conceptual and technical challenges currently faced by novice AR creators who are beginner programmers and presents an investigation around the design and use of progressive source code examples and an AR inspector tool to improve AR learner experiences. We characterize and address the challenges in designing step-by-step examples specifically for AR based on a survey with 17 students recruited from an AR/VR development course. We also present findings from a focus group with 5 of the students using our progressive example source code of an AR scene in combination with our AR inspector tool. We find that even simple features such as visualizing the world origin, relative camera and object positions, and 3D model pivot points already enhance novices’ understanding of 3D computer graphics and AR concepts and that interactive debugging tools with alerts for missing colliders and touch handlers can better facilitate AR learner experiences.