Usability Considerations of Hand Held Augmented Reality Wiring Tutors

Electrical repair tasks across domains use a common set of skills that combine problem solving, fine motor and spatial skills. Augmented Reality (AR) helps develop these skills by overlaying virtual objects on the real-world. So we designed a hand held AR-based wiring tutor which incorporates Constraint-Based Modelling (CBM) paradigms to detect learner errors in an electrical wiring task. We compared the performance and usability of our prototype with a state of the art hand held AR-based training system with a consistent user interface (UI) design, which lacks CBM approaches. Although, the CBM condition had significantly lower usability scores than the state of the art, participants using the CBM approach reported higher practical scores. We discuss reasons for the usability differences, including potential for positive perceptions of the system to be distorted by critical feedback needed to regulate learning in the electrical wiring domain. Next steps would include using the same system to evaluate the theoretical and practical learning outcomes.