In a future of pervasive augmented reality (AR), AR systems will need to be able to efficiently draw or guide the attention of the user to visual points of interest in their physical-virtual environment. Since AR imagery is overlaid on top of the user's view of their physical environment, these attention guidance techniques must not only compete with other virtual imagery, but also with distracting or attention-grabbing features in the user's physical environment. Because of the wide range of physical-virtual environments that pervasive AR users will find themselves in, it is difficult to design visual cues that “pop out” to the user without performing a visual analysis of the user's environment, and changing the appearance of the cue to stand out from its surroundings. In this paper, we present an initial investigation into the potential uses of dichoptic visual cues for optical see-through AR displays, specifically cues that involve having a difference in hue, saturation, or value between the user's eyes. These types of cues have been shown to be preattentively processed by the user when presented on other stereoscopic displays, and may also be an effective method of drawing user attention on optical see-through AR displays. We present two user studies: one that evaluates the saliency of dichoptic visual cues on optical see-through displays, and one that evaluates their subjective qualities. Our results suggest that hue-based dichoptic cues or “Forbidden Colors” may be particularly effective for these purposes, achieving significantly lower error rates in a pop out task compared to value-based and saturation-based cues.
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Pointing in the third-person: an exploration of human motion and visual pointing aids for 3D virtual mirrors
A “virtual mirror” is a promising interface for virtual or augmented reality applications in which users benefit from seeing themselves within the environment, such as serious games for rehabilitation exercise or biological education. While there is extensive work analyzing pointing and providing assistance for first-person perspectives, mirrored third-person perspectives have been minimally considered, limiting the quality of user interactions in current virtual mirror applications. We address this gap with two user studies aimed at understanding pointing motions with a mirror view and assessing visual cues that assist pointing. An initial two-phase preliminary study had users tune and test nine different visual aids. This was followed by in-depth testing of the best four of those visual aids compared with unaided pointing. Results give insight into both aided and unaided pointing with this mirrored third-person view, and compare visual cues. We note a pattern of consistently pointing far in front of targets when first introduced to the pointing task, but that initial unaided motion improves after practice with visual aids. We found that the presence of stereoscopy is not sufficient for enhancing accuracy, supporting the use of other visual cues that we developed. We show that users perform pointing differently when pointing behind and in front of themselves. We finally suggest which visual aids are most promising for 3D pointing in virtual mirror interfaces.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1815976
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10406657
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Virtual Reality
- Volume:
- 27
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1359-4338
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 2099-2116
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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