ARtist: Interactive Augmented Reality For Curating Children’s Artworks

Abstract

Art education plays an important role in a child’s education. It evokes creativity, supports self-expression, and builds confidence. In traditional art education, children’s artwork has been displayed on the bulletin boards, walls, hallways, or art rooms utilizing frames, tables, or pedestals. This encourages children’s communication and collaboration. However, presenting children’s artworks on a physical display becomes challenging because it requires sufficient space and equipment at school. Unfortunately, in school the arts are a low-priority subject, causing lower funds to be allocated to art classes. Due to current limitations, children usually do not expect their works to be displayed at school very often. Furthermore, many schools have transitioned to virtual education because of the spread of COVID-19 which limits hands-on art activities and physical display opportunities. Thus, seeking alternative ways to present and share children’s artworks is critical. Recent innovations in augmented and virtual reality technology open new opportunities to enhance the traditional art experience and connect people through children’s artworks. We developed ARtist, a mobile augmented reality application to meet these needs. ARtist aims to improve traditional art display mechanisms and presentation environments with augmented reality technology. Users can incorporate virtual art objects within their own environment using a smartphone. A formal user study with children was conducted to explore how ARtist supports children to curate, display, and share their artworks. Children participated via Zoom by importing photos of their artworks and placing them within their own environment using ARtist. The study session was recorded and collected video data was transcribed and later analyzed using qualitative analysis. Children’s experiences with ARtist were extremely positive. The results show that children were highly engaged while they were decorating their environment with their own artworks and, they wanted to share their AR shows with other people. This study suggests future improvements of ARtist in terms of the scope and functionality.