Effects of AR Display Context Switching and Focal Distance Switching on Human Performance

In augmented reality (AR) environments, information is often distributed between real world and virtual contexts, and often appears at different distances from the user. Therefore, to integrate the information, users must repeatedly switch context and refocus the eyes. To focus at different distance...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 25; no. 6; pp. 2228 - 2241
Main Authors: Gabbard, Joseph L., Mehra, Divya Gupta, Swan, J. Edward
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States IEEE 01.06.2019
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Accommodation, Ocular - physiology
Adult
and virtual realities
Asthenopia - physiopathology
augmented
Augmented Reality
Computer Graphics
Ergonomics
evaluation/methodology
Eye (anatomy)
Fatigue
Female
Fixation, Ocular - physiology
Flat panel displays
Head-up displays
Human performance
Humans
Male
Multimedia
Multimedia information systems—artificial
Optical switches
Performance degradation
screen design
style guides
Switching
Task analysis
Task Performance and Analysis
User interfaces—ergonomics
User-Computer Interface
Visual tasks
Visualization
Young Adult
ISSN:1077-2626, 1941-0506, 1941-0506
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In augmented reality (AR) environments, information is often distributed between real world and virtual contexts, and often appears at different distances from the user. Therefore, to integrate the information, users must repeatedly switch context and refocus the eyes. To focus at different distances, the user's eyes must accommodate, which when done repeatedly can cause eyestrain and degrade task performance. An experiment was conducted that examined switching context and focal distance between a real and an AR environment, using a text-based visual search task and a monocular optical see-through AR display. Both context switching and focal distance switching resulted in significantly reduced performance. In addition, repeatedly performing the task caused visual fatigue to steadily increase. Performance was particularly poor for virtual text presented at optical infinity, and for target letters that participants tried to read before their eyes had completely accommodated to a new focal distance. The results show that context switching and focal distance switching are important AR user interface design issues.
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ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2018.2832633