Examining the impact of head-mounted augmented reality on learning engineering drawings: A case study for three-view drawing

As the cornerstone of spatial geometry and engineering drawings, three-view drawing lays the necessary foundation for students to learn geography, graphics, industrial design, geographic information science, and so forth. However, teaching three-view drawing can be challenging due to its abstraction. Currently, desktop and handheld augmented reality (AR) systems are widely applied to three-view teaching. However, existing systems suffer from visuo-tactile inconsistency and contain unfriendly interactions, resulting in a poor learning experience. In this paper, head-mounted AR is introduced for the first time in the teaching of three-view drawing. A system was designed for learning three-view drawing to facilitate students' free exploration and learning in lessons. Additionally, a comparative experiment was designed and conducted to investigate whether multimodal interaction and head-mounted AR help students to better understand the relationship between concrete three-dimensional (3D) objects and abstract two-dimensional planes and the impact on subjective perceptions. The results demonstrated that the proposed system significantly improved learning performance. Furthermore, the proposed system heightened students' interest in learning, made reproducing 3D structures more intuitive, and students were more willing to use such systems in their future studies.