• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.79-89
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• 2022

With the popularity and the advanced graphics hardware technology of mobile devices, various mobile applications that help children with physical activities have been studied. This paper presents SandUp, a mobile application that guides the play of building sand castles using artificial intelligence and augmented reality(AR) technology. In the process of building the sandcastle, children can interactively explore the target virtual sandcastle through the smartphone display using AR technology. In addition, to help children complete the sandcastle, SandUp informs the sand shape and task required step by step and provides visual and auditory feedback while recognizing progress in real-time using the phone's camera and deep learning classification. We prototyped our SandUp app using Flutter and TensorFlow Lite. To evaluate the usability and effectiveness of the proposed SandUp, we conducted a questionnaire survey on 50 adults and a user study on 20 children aged 4~7 years. The survey results showed that SandUp effectively helps build the sandcastle with proper interactive guidance. Based on the results from the user study on children and feedback from their parents, we also derived usability issues that can be further improved and suggested future research directions.