Implementation of a Marker Type Augmented Reality-based Free Music Trial Listening Application at Physical Music Stores

The way we listen to music has undergone major changes—from cassette tapes and records to com- pact disks (CDs) and digital music that includes subscription-based online streaming and download- able sound sources. However, despite the popularity of digital music, CDs continue to be used as a means of listening to music due to the following reasons: the sense of safety felt upon holding the actual product and the collection factor for people interested in building personal collections. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic occurred in 2019, amid growing anxiety and turmoil about contact with “people” and “things,” users have become sensitive to the use of auditioning machines at CD shops. Therefore, we have developed a music trial listening application that uses augmented reality (AR) technology to enable people who visit CD shops to listen to the music of artists they are interested in without any physical contact with the auditioning machines. Users can feel the com- mitment of the artist by actually holding the CD jacket in their hands via AR; they can also view various types of information about the artist by recognizing the image on the CD jacket by using our AR technology-based developed application. Our proposed application consists of the “Listening Mode,” which provides the music trial listening function, and “AR Mode,” which provides the artist information presentation function. Further, we conducted an evaluation experiment with 30 sub- jects to evaluate the operability, readability, functionality, relevance, effectiveness, applicability, and safety of our developed application compared to the CD auditioning machine. The experiment results showed highly positive user evaluations regarding most of the abovementioned tested attributes. The user evaluations also showed that there is room for improvement regarding the operability of the AR objects generated via the application. In future studies, we aim to focus on the improvement of the application’s operability and enrichment of its contents, for example, we plan to add the “background playback function” and “administrator content registration function” to the existing functions of the applications.