The steady increase of the capabilities of mobile devices and the appearance of novel head-mounted widgets has triggered the interest in developing Augmented Reality (ARs) applications. In these applications, virtual objects can be overlaid over the real ones, and the user can interact with the virtual objects. AR applications open the door to innovative scenarios both for industrial use and leisure. However, their construction requires substantial effort and specialised knowledge.

In this paper, we report on a model-driven approach to build AR applications that eliminates the need for manual coding. It is based on the definition of a domain meta-model, enriched with AR representations for the domain concepts and a description of the interaction with external information systems and devices. This paper presents the concepts, the technical realisation in an iOS tool called AlteR, an evaluation on five case studies, and a user study demonstrating its usefulness and usability.