Mobile Augmented Reality Apps in Education: Exploring the User Experience Through Large-Scale Public Reviews

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is considered one of the top technologies that will revolutionize the future of education. Real-time interaction, different formats of visualization, and the merge of the real and digital world may open up new opportunities for teaching and learning. Although AR is easily accessible via mobile phones, the extent to which this technology will be adopted greatly depends on the user experience. The user reviews of mobile applications or so-called "apps" are a potential source of information for designers, software developers, and scholars interested in understanding the user experience. This study investigates the current state of the user experience of augmented reality apps by extracting and classifying the information from reviews published in the Google Play Store. A set of 116 educational mobile AR apps were mined from the Google Play Store, and a total of 1,752 user reviews were retrieved and classified. Results suggest developers of educational mobile AR apps need to solve technical problems, improve certain features, and provide more explicit instructions to users. Regardless of these needs, users recognize that these apps have great potential as educational tools. Future developments should focus on tackling these shortcomings, expanding the use of AR apps to more fields of education, and targeting specific audiences to extend the technology adoption.

A Systematic Review of the Design of Serious Games for Innovative Learning: Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, or Mixed Reality?

“…Therefore, researchers usually desire benchmark datasets ready to conduct research studies. Table 6 summarizes 15 benchmark datasets in descending order in publication year [109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120][121][122][123], comprising VR [109,111,113,114,116,123] or AR [110,112,115,[117][118][119][120][121][122] data for educational research. Driving training to improve vehicle-pedestrian interactions [123] Open access 169 users contributed 1980 gazes and head trajectories using VR automatic alignment of VR video cuts…”

“…For datasets [120,121,123], although the applications are indirectly related to education, the datasets can contribute to user behavior analysis [120], enhancement of the simulation environment [121], and alignment of VR video cuts [123]. There are three types of accessibility for the benchmark datasets, namely open access [109,[119][120][121][122][123], a reasonable request to the corresponding author [110][111][112][113][114][116][117][118], and a request by returning a completed form called an end user license agreement [115]. The first type best maximizes the download rate, whereas the other types facilitate better interactions between researchers (data owners and downloaders).…”

A context‐aware mobile augmented reality pet interaction model to enhance user experience

“…Researchers also made great efforts on the issues of tracking, 8 rendering, 9 interaction, 10 and user experience 11 in MAR system. Meanwhile, MAR shows its tremendous potential in education, 12 tourism, 13 medical treatment 14 and many other fields. It is remarkable that some MAR games obtained great achievements and became extremely popular such as Pokémon Go, 15 where players can find and capture the virtual Pokémon while exploring the real world.…”

From the classroom to the game: applying available pedagogical guidelines in game-based learning

“…The idea of integrating game-based learning into engineering classes is not new: educational games (games that focus on pedagogic objectives rather than entertainment, also known as serious games) have been used and registered as part of the literature. We can see examples that range from interactive simulations where one studies the behavior of a distillation tower [1], to racing games to learn automatic control [2], machining web applications for mechanical engineering [3], phone games for organic chemistry [4], 3D chemical plants [5], labs [6], [7], up to VR and AR applications [7]- [10] to show only a few examples.…”