Comparison of development and characteristics of several educational tools in augmented reality for visualization of 3D models difficult to understand. Chemistry application case

Abstract

This paper shows the development of different scenarios in augmented reality (AR) using several programming tools, these applications were focused on visualization of 3D Bohr atomic models of the chemical elements from periodic table, organic and inorganic chemical molecules. The development tools were a) Unity3D in conjunction with the EasyAR SDK, b) HTML 5, CSS and the Google ARCore software development kit, c) Spark AR Studio and d) Adobe Aero with Glitch and HTML 5. The different scenarios created and described in this work were designed and developed to improve the learning of topics in an area of chemistry that requires three-dimensional models. The developments allowed 3D visualization and the interaction with the models to achieve several views of them, since the representations of these models are traditionally projected in books in two dimensions, making their understanding and interpretation in a not easy form.