Smart devices and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are replacing or being incorporated into traditional devices at a growing pace. The use of digital interfaces to interact with these devices has become a common occurrence in homes, work spaces, and various industries around the world. The most common interfaces for these connected devices focus on mobile apps or voice control via intelligent virtual assistants. However, with augmented reality (AR) becoming more popular and accessible among consumers, there are new opportunities for spatial user interfaces to seamlessly bridge the gap between digital and physical affordances. In this paper, we present a human-subject study evaluating and comparing four user interfaces for smart connected environments: gaze input, hand gestures, voice input, and a mobile app. We assessed participants’ user experience, usability, task load, completion time, and preferences. Our results show multiple trade-offs between these interfaces across these measures. In particular, we found that gaze input shows great potential for future use cases, while both gaze input and hand gestures suffer from limited familiarity among users, compared to voice input and mobile apps.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on October 16, 2024
DualStream: Spatially Sharing Selves and Surroundings using Mobile Devices and Augmented Reality
In-person human interaction relies on our spatial perception of each other and our surroundings. Current remote communication tools partially address each of these aspects. Video calls convey real user representations but without spatial interactions. Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) experiences are immersive and spatial but often use virtual environments and characters instead of real-life representations. Bridging these gaps, we introduce DualStream, a system for synchronous mobile AR remote communication that captures, streams, and displays spatial representations of users and their surroundings. DualStream supports transitions between user and environment representations with different levels of visuospatial fidelity, as well as the creation of persistent shared spaces using environment snapshots. We demonstrate how DualStream can enable spatial communication in real-world contexts, and support the creation of blended spaces for collaboration. A formative evaluation of DualStream revealed that users valued the ability to interact spatially and move between representations, and could see DualStream fitting into their own remote communication practices in the near future. Drawing from these findings, we discuss new opportunities for designing more widely accessible spatial communication tools, centered around the mobile phone.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2040489
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10484712
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 138 to 147
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Sydney, Australia
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Smart devices and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are replacing or being incorporated into traditional devices at a growing pace. The use of digital interfaces to interact with these devices has become a common occurrence in homes, work spaces, and various industries around the world. The most common interfaces for these connected devices focus on mobile apps or voice control via intelligent virtual assistants. However, with augmented reality (AR) becoming more popular and accessible among consumers, there are new opportunities for spatial user interfaces to seamlessly bridge the gap between digital and physical affordances. In this paper, we present a human-subject study evaluating and comparing four user interfaces for smart connected environments: gaze input, hand gestures, voice input, and a mobile app. We assessed participants’ user experience, usability, task load, completion time, and preferences. Our results show multiple trade-offs between these interfaces across these measures. In particular, we found that gaze input shows great potential for future use cases, while both gaze input and hand gestures suffer from limited familiarity among users, compared to voice input and mobile apps.more » « less
-
Virtual Reality (VR) telepresence platforms are being challenged to support live performances, sporting events, and conferences with thousands of users across seamless virtual worlds. Current systems have struggled to meet these demands which has led to high-profile performance events with groups of users isolated in parallel sessions. The core difference in scaling VR environments compared to classic 2D video content delivery comes from the dynamic peer-to-peer spatial dependence on communication. Users have many pair-wise interactions that grow and shrink as they explore spaces. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of VR scaling and present an architecture that supports hundreds of users with spatial audio and video in a single virtual environment. We leverage the property of \textit{spatial locality} with two key optimizations: (1) a Quality of Service (QoS) scheme to prioritize audio and video traffic based on users' locality, and (2) a resource manager that allocates client connections across multiple servers based on user proximity within the virtual world. Through real-world deployments and extensive evaluations under real and simulated environments, we demonstrate the scalability of our platform while showing improved QoS compared with existing approaches.more » « less
-
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.more » « less
-
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.more » « less
