A Comparative Study of Authoring Performances Between In-Situ Mobile and Desktop Tools for Outdoor Location-Based Augmented Reality

In recent years, Location-Based Augmented Reality (LAR) systems have been increasingly implemented in various applications for tourism, navigation, education, and entertainment. Unfortunately, the LAR content creation using conventional desktop-based authoring tools has become a bottleneck, as it requires time-consuming and skilled work. Previously, we proposed an in-situ mobile authoring tool as an efficient solution to this problem by offering direct authoring interactions in real-world environments using a smartphone. Currently, the evaluation through the comparison between the proposal and conventional ones is not sufficient to show superiority, particularly in terms of interaction, authoring performance, and cognitive workload, where our tool uses 6DoF device movement for spatial input, while desktop ones rely on mouse-pointing. In this paper, we present a comparative study of authoring performances between the tools across three authoring phases: (1) Point of Interest (POI) location acquisition, (2) AR object creation, and (3) AR object registration. For the conventional tool, we adopt Unity and ARCore SDK. As a real-world application, we target the LAR content creation for pedestrian landmark annotation across campus environments at Okayama University, Japan, and Brawijaya University, Indonesia, and identify task-level bottlenecks in both tools. In our experiments, we asked 20 participants aged 22 to 35 with different LAR development experiences to complete equivalent authoring tasks in an outdoor campus environment, creating various LAR contents. We measured task completion time, phase-wise contribution, and cognitive workload using NASA-TLX. The results show that our tool made faster creations with 60% lower cognitive loads, where the desktop tool required higher mental efforts with manual data input and object verifications.