Paper Trail: An Immersive Authoring System for Augmented Reality Instructional Experiences

Prior work has demonstrated augmented reality’s benefits to education, but current tools are difficult to integrate with traditional instructional methods. We present Paper Trail, an immersive authoring system designed to explore how to enable instructors to create AR educational experiences, leaving paper at the core of the interaction and enhancing it with various forms of digital media, animations for dynamic illustrations, and clipping masks to guide learning. To inform the system design, we developed five scenarios exploring the benefits that hand-held and head-worn AR can bring to STEM instruction and developed a design space of AR interactions enhancing paper based on these scenarios and prior work. Using the example of an AR physics handout, we assessed the system’s potential with PhD-level instructors and its usability with XR design experts. In an elicitation study with high-school teachers, we study how Paper Trail could be used and extended to enable flexible use cases across various domains. We discuss benefits of immersive paper for supporting diverse student needs and challenges for making effective use of AR for learning.