A Comparative Study on User Experiences between In-Situ Mobile and Desktop-based Tools for Location-Based Augmented Reality Content Authoring

With the rapid advancement of mobile technology, we have studied an in-situ mobile authoring tool for creating outdoor location-based augmented reality (LAR) contents directly on a smartphone. On the other hand, desktop-based tools have been mainstream to support LAR content creations. Since a lot of works are often required in the practical of LAR authoring processes, it is significant to compare the efficiency and user experience between them. In this paper, we present comparison study results between our in-situ mobile tool and a mainstream desktop-based one when several LAR contents are created at the specific point of interest (POI) location. For the desktop-based tool, we adopt Unity and ARCore SDK. For this comparison study, we asked 15 participants aged 22 to 35 in Indonesia with different LAR development experiences, to complete the tasks of creating simple LAR contents for navigation scenario, and measured the completion time and success rates. Besides, we assessed user experiences from pragmatic and hedonic points of view using the Short User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ-S). The results show that the in-situ mobile tool allowed the participants to complete the tasks three times faster than the desktop-based one, and provided better user experiences with higher UEQ-S scores. However, it was found that the desktop-based tool will manage complex 3D contents better.