High-level Authoring Tools in Augmented Reality: Analysis and Case Study

The increasing advances of both hardware and software have been allowing for richer experiences in augmented reality (AR). For instance, the creation of mobile devices with stronger processing power, graphic resources, and a mix of sensors have made possible the diffusion of applications for mobile AR. Also, recent improvements in tracking and visualization techniques have enabled the creation of applications that combine information from multiple sources, such as camera, compass, gyroscope and GPS, to display AR contents based on those wellspring, such as geo-location applications (Langlotz, The increasing group of application domains resulted in the adoption of AR by the general public, thus including marketers, designers, doctors, teachers, game and web developers. Hence, there has been a gradual demand for tools that can facilitate the development of AR applications in the sense of making this technology accessible to this diverse audience (Coleman, 2012). In this context, AR authoring tools comprise a wide range of software products with capabilities for composing, editing, and managing AR experiences. AR authoring tools can be classified according to their programming characteristics and content design from low to high-level approaches. Therefore, distinctive authoring approaches have different concept abstractions and interface complexity-and hence address audiences that do not necessarily have the same technical expertise (Hampshire, Seichter, Grasset, & Billinghurst, 2006). Still, it is important to observe that authoring approaches are constructed hierarchically: abstraction is added gradually, while low-level features and concepts are hidden. Among the approaches of AR authoring tools, it is important to note the relevance of those categorized as high-level. They remove the dependency of knowing a programming language, replacing it for graphical user interfaces to describe the virtual content and its relationship with the real scene. These high-level tools are particularly relevant because they are crucial to the widespread adoption of AR since they allow the development of applications and content by ordinary users, which have expertise