ProtoAR: Rapid Physical-Digital Prototyping of Mobile Augmented Reality Applications

The latest generations of smartphones with built-in AR capabilities enable a new class of mobile apps that merge digital and real-world content depending on a user's task, context, and preference. But even experienced mobile app designers face significant challenges: creating 2D/3D AR content remains difficult and time-consuming, and current mobile prototyping tools do not support AR views. There are separate tools for this; however, they require significant technical skill. This paper presents ProtoAR which supplements rapid physical prototyping using paper and Play-Doh with new mobile cross-device multi-layer authoring and interactive capture tools to generate mobile screens and AR overlays from paper sketches, and quasi-3D content from 360-degree captures of clay models. We describe how ProtoAR evolved over four design jams with students to enable interactive prototypes of mobile AR apps in less than 90 minutes, and discuss the advantages and insights ProtoAR can give designers.