Authoring Tools for Augmented Reality: An Analysis and Classification of Content Design Tools

Augmented Reality Authoring Tools are important instruments that can help a widespread use of Augmented Reality. They can be classified as programming or content design tools in which the latter completely removes the necessity of programming skills to develop an Augmented Reality solution. Several solutions have been developed in the past years, however there are few works aiming to identify patterns and general models for such tools. This work aims to perform a trend analysis on content design tools in order to identify their functionalities regarding Augmented Reality, authoring paradigms, deployment strategies and general dataflow models. This work is aimed to assist developers willing to create authoring tools, therefore, it focuses on the last three aspects. Thus, 24 tools were analyzed and through this evaluation it were identified two authoring paradigms and two deployment strategies. Moreover, from their combination it was possible to elaborate four generic dataflow models in which every tool could be fit into.