An Augmented Reality Environment for Learning OpenGL Programming

Novices at OpenGL programming often have the difficulty to understand an OpenGL command because of lacking precise 3D visualization of that command. In view of this, this paper presents an augmented reality (AR) environment focusing on helping the students to learn OpenGL programming in a visual and interactive way. We create a virtual working space based on AR technology where many OpenGL commands can reveal their three-dimensional interpretations in the virtual space. We encoded OpenGL commands into QR Codes and let the system to recognize these QR Codes to achieve the required flexibility. In this system, users can present their QR Codes in a suitable order to create corresponding programming codes so that they can understand these codes in a more friendly approach. By utilizing this system and its visualization capability, we believe that OpenGL learning can become more effective and easy, especially for novices in an introductory OpenGL programming course.