Interactive Authoring Tool for Mobile Augmented Reality Content

As mobile augmented reality technologies are spreading these days, many users want to produce augmented reality (AR) contents what they need by themselves. To keep pace with such needs, we have developed a mobile AR contents builder (hereafter referred to as MARB) that enables the user to easily connect a natural marker and a virtual object with various interaction events that are used to manipulate the virtual object in a mobile environment so that users can simply produce an AR content using natural photos and virtual objects that they select. MARB consists of five major modules—target manger, virtual object manager, AR accessory manager, AR content manager, and AR viewer. The target manager, virtual object manager and AR accessory manager register and manage natural target markers, various virtual objects and content accessories (such as various decorating images), respectively. The AR content manger defines a connection between a target and a virtual object with enabling various interactions for the desired functions such as translation/rotation/scaling of the virtual object, playing of a music, etc. AR viewer augments various virtual objects (such as 2D images, 3D models and video clips) on the pertinent target. MARB has been developed in a mobile application (app) format in order to create AR contents simply using mobile smart devices without switching to a PC environment for authoring the content. In this paper, we present the detail organizations and applications of MARB. It is expected that MARB will enable ordinary users to produce diverse mobile AR contents for various purposes with ease and contribute to expanding the mobile AR market based on spread of a variety of AR contents.