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1. Augmented Reality Computer-aided Design Education (ARCADE) Tool to Improve Student Motivation, Engagement, and Spatial Cognition

   Dakeev, U. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have become the worldwide huge technological innovations impacting human life significantly. While the VR is an enclosed environment separated completely from the real world, AR allows users to merge the digital and physical worlds and enable the interaction between them. The wide usage of AR has led researchers to investigate its potential capability in several areas including STEM-related fields. Previous research shows that AR assisted courses tend to enhance students’ learning, spatial cognition, increase the students’ motivation and engagement in the learning process. In this study, the researchers have developed an AR application to assist students with spatial cognition and remote course engagement independently. The ARCADE tool enables students to not only visualize the isometric product from its orthogonal views, but it also provides short tutorial clips on how a specific feature was developed and what tools were used. The students can perform basic modifications on the 3D part in the ARCADE such as section views, details views, scale, rotate and explode the assembly views. Although this project is a work in progress, the preliminary pretest and posttest results show there is a significant improvement in students’ spatial cognition when the proposed tool is used to assist the course. 

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2. AR HMD for Remote Instruction in Healthcare

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW55335.2022.00096  

   Mentis, Helena M.; Avellino, Ignacio; Seo, Jwawon (March 2022, 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops)

   In the following position paper we introduce the use of AR HMD for remote instruction in healthcare and present the challenges our team has faced in achieving this application in two contexts: surgical telementoring and paramedic teleconsulting. After the presentation of how these challenges come to be and indications on how to address them, we argue that those who wish to pursue this area of research must be grounded in best practices from the field of CSCW integrated with technical innovations in AR interaction development. This is a truly interdisciplinary research and development area that has many challenging topics to tackle through collaborative efforts. 

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3. Lights, Headset, Tablet, Action: Exploring the Use of Hybrid User Interfaces for Immersive Situated Analytics

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3698147  

   Zhou, Xiaoyan; Lee, Benjamin; Ortega, Francisco R; Batmaz, Anil Ufuk; Yang, Yalong (October 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   While augmented reality (AR) headsets provide entirely new ways of seeing and interacting with data, traditional computing devices can play a symbiotic role when used in conjunction with AR as a hybrid user interface. A promising use case for this setup is situated analytics. AR can provide embedded views that are integrated with their physical referents, and a separate device such as a tablet can provide a familiar situated overview of the entire dataset being examined. While prior work has explored similar setups, we sought to understand how people perceive and make use of visualizations presented on both embedded visualizations (in AR) and situated visualizations (on a tablet) to achieve their own goals. To this end, we conducted an exploratory study using a scenario and task familiar to most: adjusting light levels in a smart home based on personal preference and energy usage. In a prototype that simulates AR in virtual reality, embedded visualizations are positioned next to lights distributed across an apartment, and situated visualizations are provided on a handheld tablet. We observed and interviewed 19 participants using the prototype. Participants were easily able to perform the task, though the extent the visualizations were used during the task varied, with some making decisions based on the data and others only on their own preferences. Our findings also suggest the two distinct roles that situated and embedded visualizations can have, and how this clear separation might improve user satisfaction and minimize attention-switching overheads in this hybrid user interface setup. We conclude by discussing the importance of considering the user's needs, goals, and the physical environment for designing and evaluating effective situated analytics applications. 

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4. Integrating AR and VR for Mobile Remote Collaboration

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct.2019.00041  

   Venerella, Jeremy; Franklin, Tyler; Sherpa, Lakpa; Tang, Hao; Zhu, Zhigang (October 2019, Proceedings - International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, ISMAR)

   In many complex tasks, a remote expert may need to assist a local user or to guide his or her actions in the local user's environment. Existing solutions also allow multiple users to collaborate remotely using high-end Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD). In this paper, we propose a portable remote collaboration approach, with the integration of AR and VR devices, both running on mobile platforms, to tackle the challenges of existing approaches. The AR mobile platform processes the live video and measures the 3D geometry of the local environment of a local user. The 3D scene is then transited and rendered in the remote side on a mobile VR device, along with a simple and effective user interface, which allows a remote expert to easily manipulate the 3D scene on the VR platform and to guide the local user to complete tasks in the local environment. 

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5. Exploring the Limitations of Environment Lighting on Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3385959.3418445  

   Erickson, Austin; Kim, Kangsoo; Bruder, Gerd; Welch, Gregory F. (October 2020, ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   Due to the additive light model employed by most optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMDs), they provide the best augmented reality (AR) views in dark environments, where the added AR light does not have to compete against existing real-world lighting. AR imagery displayed on such devices loses a significant amount of contrast in well-lit environments such as outdoors in direct sunlight. To compensate for this, OST-HMDs often use a tinted visor to reduce the amount of environment light that reaches the user’s eyes, which in turn results in a loss of contrast in the user’s physical environment. While these effects are well known and grounded in existing literature, formal measurements of the illuminance and contrast of modern OST-HMDs are currently missing. In this paper, we provide illuminance measurements for both the Microsoft HoloLens 1 and its successor the HoloLens 2 under varying environment lighting conditions ranging from 0 to 20,000 lux. We evaluate how environment lighting impacts the user by calculating contrast ratios between rendered black (transparent) and white imagery displayed under these conditions, and evaluate how the intensity of environment lighting is impacted by donning and using the HMD. Our results indicate the further need for refinement in the design of future OST-HMDs to optimize contrast in environments with illuminance values greater than or equal to those found in indoor working environments. 

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