From 11 to 13 October 2026, the EDARA consortium met in person for the first time at the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki for our first AR authoring expert workshop! EDARA is a European Erasmus+ cooperation partnership coordinated by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). It brings together seven partners from Norway, Ireland, Greece, Germany, and Ukraine to connect research, development, and teaching around one shared question: how can educators create their own Augmented Reality learning content in higher education, and how can AI support them in doing so?
Several partners brought their own AR authoring tools into the project and to this workshop for hands-on demos: five AR authoring platforms in total, among them MirageXR, ARTutor, smARtorials, and our own TrainAR. Thies Pfeiffer and Jonas Blattgerste presented TrainAR, its path from the Heb@AR midwifery trainings to an open-source framework for procedural AR trainings more broadly, and two demo trainings, a coffee-making training and a petrol 4-stroke engine training, both available on GitHub
The platforms are technically very different, but we quickly found many shared perspectives and problems. We had very fruitful discussions about how to lower the barrier for educators to get started, and which parts of authoring a tool should handle automatically versus which should remain the teacher’s job. We were very impressed by the other partners’ tools and came away with many new ideas.
As part of this workshop, we also were able to put the tools in front of their future users. Around 30 students and 10 teachers tried all platforms, including TrainAR, and gave us insightful feedback through questionnaires and focus group interviews. A big thank you to the University of Macedonia for hosting us, and to all partners for three productive days. We are really looking forward to the collaborative work within this consortium and project!
The project EDARA is co-funded by the European Union’s Erasmus+ program under grant agreement 2026-1-NO01-KA220-HED-000462029. Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EACEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
