ARKitchen: Kitchen Design with Tangible Augmented Reality Using Magnetic Markers and Iron Workspace

Modern kitchen cabinets play an important role by offering more than just storage. They are designed to improve convenience, efficiency, and sustainability in the kitchen. While designers have a clear vision of the kitchen layout, customers may find it harder to visualize. However, the customer may find it challenging to fully comprehend how the design will manifest in reality. Augmented reality helps users visualize kitchen designs in 3D, making users perceive the design more effectively. This study proposed and evaluated an application named "ARKitchen" that uses augmented reality technology to visualize the kitchen in 3D. The application offers manipulation features such as placing, relocating, and deleting kitchen cabinets, as well as adjusting their characteristics. Additionally, it utilizes a physical workspace and magnetic cards as tangible mediums to facilitate intuitive interaction. Each magnetic card represents a different size and type of kitchen cabinet. Users place the cards on an iron workspace to arrange their ideal cabinet layout. The application has been evaluated by 25 users from the end user’s perception of quality attributes (QA), cognitive attributes (CA), and attitude towards using (ATU). Overall, users gave positive feedback on ARKitchen. The results show that quality (QA) scored 4.09, cognitive ease (CA) 4.06, and user satisfaction (ATU) 4.49. Users found the app useful, reliable, and easy to use (QA), with low mental effort (CA). They were satisfied and would like to use it for kitchen design (ATU).