Web based Augmented Reality for Information Delivery Services A Performance Study

Augmented Reality (AR) is the overlapping of the real world and the virtual world. AR is an evolving technology, and its implementation opens up a new direction to multiple types of information access services rendered to the users. The digital library section of the central library IIT Kharagpur has a rich collection of several items like CD/DVD ROMs, Digital Scanners, and VR Devices. Library developed in-house WebAR programs using “ar.js” that support “three.js” and “A-Frame” for Augmented Reality rendering on the web. This study tried to evaluate web-based AR programs’ performance on mobile devices with low-end hardware configuration supporting WebGL and WebRTC. We conducted quantitative research to find the performance of the web-based AR applications using the four independent variables, namely frames per second (fps), request animation frame (raf), load time (lt), entity object (eo). The paper is also helpful to the academic librarians who think about implementing augmented reality library services with no cost involved. The AR-based information service is beneficial to library users with new COVID norms1, as the user does not need to touch anything to get the information. Instead, it gets into his/ her mobile device.