The Impact of Navigation Aids on Search Performance and Object Recall in Wide-Area Augmented Reality

Radha Kumaran, You-Jin Kim, A Milner, Tom Bullock, Barry Giesbrecht, and Tobias Höllerer:
The Impact of Navigation Aids on Search Performance and Object Recall in Wide-Area Augmented Reality. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM CHI 2023
Presented: ACM CHI 2023 - [Supporting users in AR and VR Session] April 26, 2023, Hamburg, Germany

▪️  DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581413    ▪️  arXiv: 10.48550/arXiv.2510.25957

Abstract

When several individuals collaborate on a shared task, their brain activities often synchronize. This phenomenon, known as Inter-brain Synchronization (IBS), is notable for inducing prosocial outcomes such as enhanced interpersonal feelings, including closeness, trust, empathy, and more. Further strengthening the IBS with the aid of external feedback would be beneficial for scenarios where those prosocial feelings play a vital role in interpersonal communication, such as rehabilitation between a therapist and a patient, motor skill learning between a teacher and a student, and group performance art. This paper investigates whether visual, auditory, and haptic feedback of the IBS level can further enhance its intensity, offering design recommendations for feedback systems in IBS. We report findings when three different types of feedback were provided: IBS level feedback by means of on-body projection mapping, sonification using chords, and vibration bands attached to the wrist.

Research Contributions

• All three AR navigation aids significantly minimize visual search trial time and total head rotation compared to navigating with no assistive cues.

• World-stabilized in-world arrows yield faster walking speeds and lower early-stage trial times, making them highly preferred over head-stabilized on-screen interfaces.

• Head-stabilized aids like radar and compass concentrate eye gaze on the screen overlay, restricting natural visual scanning of the environment.

• Screen-stabilized interfaces maintain comprehensive target visibility when physical structures occlude lines of sight, outperforming spatial arrows in late-stage search.

• Complex linear interfaces like the on-screen compass induce higher cognitive load, significantly slowing user reaction times in secondary auditory tasks.

Citation IEEE Format

[1] R. Kumaran et al., "The Impact of Navigation Aids on Search Performance and Object Recall in Wide-Area Augmented Reality," in Proc. CHI Conf. Human Factors Comput. Syst., Hamburg, Germany, 2023, Art. no. 710, pp. 1–17, doi: 10.1145/3544548.3581413. (17 Pages)

Citation APA Format

Kumaran, R., Kim, Y-J., Milner, E. A., Bullock, T., Giesbrecht, B., & Höllerer, T. (2023). The impact of navigation aids on search performance and object recall in wide-area augmented reality. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581413. (17 Pages)