Role of Perceived Ease of Use for Augmented Reality App Designed to Help Children Navigate Smart Libraries

In this article, we sought to determine whether perceived enjoyment (PE), perceived ease of use (PEOU), and perceived usefulness (PU) impacted children’s attitude toward using an augmented reality mobile application (app) to search for books in a smart library. We used an experiment and a questionnaire survey to measure the perceptions of 238 children of the proposed app. Structural equation modeling was applied in conjunction with the technology acceptance model and flow theory to analyze the collected data. Participants tended to take less notice of their spatial context while using the app and rather focused on their experience of the route. Children’s attitudes toward the app were most influenced by PEOU, followed by PE, and PU. This article provides evidence that children with limited cognition abilities using ego-centered navigation to find selected targets tend to emphasize PEOU and thus prioritize processing temporal concepts over emotional and spatial concepts.