The Trouble with Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Authoring Tools

There are many technical and design challenges in creating new, usable and useful AR/VR applications. In particular, non-technical designers and end-users are facing a lack of tools to quickly and easily prototype and test new AR/VR user experiences. We review and classify existing AR/VR authoring tools and characterize three primary issues with these tools based on our review and a case study. To address the issues, we discuss two new tools we designed with support for rapid prototyping of new AR/VR content and gesture-based interactions geared towards designers without technical knowledge in gesture recognition, 3D modeling, and programming.