MRCAT: In Situ Prototyping of Interactive AR Environments

Augmented reality (AR) blends physical and virtual components to create a mixed reality experience. This unique display medium presents new opportunities for application design, as applications can move beyond the desktop and integrate with the physical environment. In order to build effective applications for AR displays, we need to be able to iteratively design for different contexts or scenarios. We present MRCAT (Mixed Reality Content Authoring Toolkit), a tool for in situ prototyping of mixed reality environments. We discuss the initial design of MRCAT and iteration after a study (\(N = 14\)) to evaluate users’ abilities to craft AR applications with MRCAT and with a 2D prototyping tool. We contextualize our system in a case study of museum exhibit development, identifying how existing ideation and prototyping workflows could be bolstered with the approach offered by MRCAT. With our exploration of in situ prototyping, we enumerate key aspects both of AR application design and targeted domains that help guide design of more effective AR prototyping tools.