ARIEL Augmented Reality Experience Builder: An AR experience authoring tool for museum professionals

Macromedia Director revolutionized the creation of kiosk activities in museums, making the design and development of the programs simple and accessible to many users who formerly found the process of software creation too daunting. Similarly, Adobe Flash has made the creation of animations and games much easier for a broad user base, thus changing kiosk and website experiences even further.

The ARIEL Augmented Reality Experience Builder will have a similar impact on the museum field, making augmented reality experience design accessible to mainstream museum professionals. The software to be produced should be a tool that opens up the possibilities of using augmented reality overlays on physical exhibits and models to users who have never created AR experiences before.

AR invites several different types of input: glyph, background differencing and hardware (serial or usb interface physical devices). It offers visual and audio output, based either on a library of images and videos, or animations created on the fly with mathematical models.

Currently there are programming libraries that allow for these things to be done, but they require skill in a sophisticated programming language such as C/C++. Also available are higher level authoring tools such as MaxMSP or EyesWeb, which can perform some of the elements listed above, but not all.

The ARIEL AR Experience Builder will allow a computer literate museum professional to select one or many inputs and link them to one or many outputs to create a custom augmented reality experience on the topic of their choice. This user will be able to add videos, images and models to the output library, as well as glyphs and hardware devices to the input library. These inputs and outputs need to be available to the user simultaneously and side-by-side. All of the functions must be integrated and packaged within the program.

The interface of the software should be graphical, and the system should require no text-based syntax. The users will be computer literate, but might have absolutely no prior programming experience. It is understood that there will be a learning curve for the system, but one that most people should be able to manage with a few days of experimenting with the software and reading the user manual.

The ARIEL AR Experience Builder will be released as open source software. The intent is to distribute it freely among science museum professionals around the world. As such, its source code must be well documented and its architecture needs to allow for expansion via new modules, inputs, outputs, models, etc.