Development and Implementation of an Augmented Reality Thunderstorm Simulation for General Aviation Weather Theory Training

. In 2021, there were 1,157 general aviation (GA) accidents, 210 of them fatal, making GA the deadliest civil aviation category. Research shows that accidents are partially caused by ineffective weather theory training. Current weather training in classrooms relies on 2D materials that students often find difficult to map into a real 3D environment. To address these issues, Augmented Reality (AR) was utilized to provide 3D immersive content while running on commodity devices. However, mobile devices have limitations in rendering, camera tracking, and screen size. These limitations make the implementation of mobile device based AR especially challenging for complex visualization of weather phenomena. This paper presents research on how to address the technical challenges of developing and implementing a complex thunderstorm visualization in a marker-based mobile AR application. The development of the system and a technological evaluation of the application’s rendering and tracking performance across different devices is presented.