A Systematic Literature Review of Augmented Reality in Engineering Education - Hardware, Software, Student Motivation & Development Recommendations

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk

Augmented Reality (AR) is examined as an emerging teaching technology for engineering education, leveraging widespread access to computational devices. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) synthesizes AR-focused education research through four research questions and identifies development and testing trends for AR software used by engineering students. Findings highlight leading research activity in Germany and India, emphasize Unity as the most used application tool, and smartphone as the primary target hardware. The review also documents strong researcher interest in improving student motivation and derives development recommendations accordingly.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages19

Reading Time48 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Augmented Reality and its role in engineering education

AR in engineering education: hardware, software, and learning outcomes

Benefits of AR in education

Systematic Literature Review approach

Research questions and extracted trends

Recommendations and development directions

A Systematic Literature Review of Augmented Reality in Engineering Education: Hardware, Software, Student Motivation & Development Recommendations. Mauricio Vásquez-Carbonell [mvasquez1@cuc.edu.co](mvasquez1@cuc.edu.co) Universidad de la Costa, Colombia Abstract Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that has benefited from the massification of computational devices, putting it in the focus of researchers as a novel teaching aid in engineering. For this very reason, a great amount of information about AR in engineering education is emerging constantly. To synthesize the information, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was carried out and 4 research questions were raised. It was found out the researcher´s trend for the development and testing of software that takes advantage of AR for engineering students. It was also found that Germany and India are the leading nations on investigations about the investigated topic. On the software side, Unity is the most used tool for creating applications and that the target hardware is smartphone. Finally, the high interest of researchers to increase motivation in students is evidenced in this SLR and recommendations were made based on the researcher’s findings. Keywords Augmented Reality; Engineering Education; Student Motivation; Development recommendations. M.Vasquez-Carbonell Digital Education Review-Number 41, June 2022 249 A Systematic Literature Review of Augmented Reality in Engineering Education : Hardware, Software, Student Motivation & Development Recommendations. I. Introduction Augmented Reality (AR), along with Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) are technologies that provide new ways to accomplish the Teacher-Student knowledge transfer process (Grodotzki, Ortelt & Tekkaya 2018) . Focusing on AR, it is appropriate to confirm that it has benefited from the different common-daily technologies, creating a change in the perception of what formal education/ training can be (Akçayır & Akçayır 2017; Karakus, Ersozlu & Clark 2019; Zhu, Cao & Cai 2020) . Large companies have also noticed the trend to use AR and have developed multiple projects to promote its use, as well as produced hardware (such as Microsoft with HoloLens) and software (such as Google with ARCore) that are widely available for use (Mylonas, Triantafyllis & Amaxilatis 2019) . There are many successful cases that support the aforementioned, for example, the use of AR together with books to teach electromagnetism to children in schools, which has proven to be beneficial for those students who have problems in this subject using traditional methods (Billinghurst & Dünser 2012), the use of AR to provide real-time information to surgeons, both new and expert, in order to identify the area to operate and obtain real-time feedback on their performance (Fourman et al. 2021) and the use of projectors, audio AR and see-through glasses in order to create an interactive environment and thus, encouraging a user to improve their physical skills (Soltani & Morice 2020) . AR shows benefits for retention of knowledge, as well as the understanding of the complicated topics, better performance of physical activities, an increased willingness to collaborative work, reduction in the distraction of students and a more efficient learning process (Radu 2014; Billinghurst & Dünser 2012) . These benefits can be seen in Table 1. The principle of AR consists in the union of virtual three-dimensional objects like texts and images with the real world (Reyes-Aviles & Aviles-Cruz 2018) . These elements are created using specific software (Opriş et al. 2018), such as Unity (Liu et al. 2019) and Vuforia (Bakkiyaraj et al. 2020), to later be displayed using specialized hardware like AR glasses (Bologna et al. 2020) and smartphones (Mylonas, Triantafyllis & Amaxilatis 2019), with the purpose of providing a user with greater knowledge of their environment. This technology has been improving over time, which drew the

FAQs

What did the Systematic Literature Review investigate about AR in engineering education?

It synthesized AR research in engineering education using four research questions, covering study topics, study origins, the most used software, and the most used hardware.

Which software and hardware are reported as most commonly used in the AR studies?

Unity is described as the most used tool for creating AR applications, and smartphones are identified as the main target hardware.

What areas do the findings emphasize beyond technology—especially for students?

The review highlights increasing researcher interest in improving student motivation, and it provides development recommendations based on the synthesized findings.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk