Supporting Early Design Activities for AR Experiences

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe DART: The Designer’s Augmented Reality Toolkit an authoring environment for rapidly prototyping augmented reality experiences. We summarize the most significant problems faced by designers working with AR in the real world, and use DART as the example to guide a discussion of the AR design process which we have broken down into four stages (idea exploration, population of the virtual world, application development, and evaluation). The focus of our work with DART has been on supporting early design activities, especially a rapid transition from storyboards to working experience, so that the experiential part of a design can be tested early and often.