On the Development of Context-Aware Augmented Reality Applications

Overview & Synopsis

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technique that enables users to interact with their physical environment through the overlay of digital information. With the spread of AR applications in various domains (e.g. product design, manufacturing or maintenance) and the introduction of concepts such as Pervasive Augmented Reality (PAR), the aspect context-awareness started to play an important role. By sensing the user’s current context and adapting the AR application accordingly, an adequate user experience can be achieved. Due to the complex structure and composition of AR applications, their development is a challenging task. Although, context-awareness for AR systems was addressed to some extent, a systematic method for development of context-aware AR applications is not fully covered yet. Therefore, in this paper, we identify the main challenges for development of context-aware AR applications and sketch our solution idea for a model-based development framework. The benefit and applicability of our solution idea is shown on the basis of two example mobile AR applications supporting context-awareness.