Project Series: Lost in Augmented Reality Learning Experiences

Augmented reality (AR) may be a fun tool for a lot of people. However, during my Ph.D. years in 2019-2021, it was never fun at all. It is definitely the most challenging (and depressing in some ways) project in my life. Well, to be fair, maybe all Ph.D. research projects are tedious, daunting, and intimidating. But I think there are projects which you can reasonably believe "Yes. I can do it". In my opinion, an AR project may not fall into that category unfortunately (except you have plenty of resources, workforce, and time).

This is just yet another vent post project series to tell a story behind an AR project in my Ph.D. life. I'd like to talk about all I believe a successful application of AR must fulfill three important criteria, namely

• the fitness of content (only certain types of content have value in AR),
• the naturalness of interaction (does your product fit into current user behavior, or are you asking users to fit into your product?"), and
• the cost of development (think twice about the cost-to-feasibility ratio).

Despite the seemingly intuitive and interactive interface, AR is never an easy tool to use when it comes to practical applications. Whoever wishes to use AR may immediately encounter the above three challenges. In this series, I would like to tell a story of my experience in developing AR learning experience (ARLE) for computing education. I will explain every version of prototypes I developed, the rationale behind them, why they fail (or succeed), and lessons learned.

Here are some tentative topics (links will be added when they are done):

• What is AR, exactly?
• The 1st prototype: AR of concepts in object-oriented designs
• The 2nd prototype: AR and embodiment
• The 3rd prototype: AR and visualization in group collaboration
• The 4th prototype: AR and remote work
• The 5th prototype: AR and collaborative problem-solving
• Designing ARLE: Three lessons I learned

And that's all for today.