AR displays have been envisioned as the next generation personal computing device. However, design challenges still remain unaddressed in terms of: (1) how to display information to users without distracting or disrupting their tasks in the real world, (2) how AR can support people's common and unstructured everyday activities, and (3) how would people perceive using AR as compared to existing devices such as smart phones. In this project, we explored the three how's, and developed a proof-of-concept AR system that displays personal information such as email, calendar, fitness, to-do list together with real-world information such as news, weather and time to users via glanceable widgets. The widgets can be world-fixed or body-fixed depending on contexts of use. Below is a demonstration of using the system while working in front of a desktop, cooking and walking outside.
Here is a short concept video I made:
Below is a video prototype we developed via Wizard-of-Oz approach:
We highlight several features of our prototype:
We also built a working prototype on the Magic Leap One AR headset. The working prototype was linked with user's own personal Google account to display relevant information such as Google calendar, Gmail, Google Fit, and To-do lists. We distributed the headset to 6 participants to evaluate it in authentic everyday use cases. All participants considered the interface useful and less distracting than existing devices. More results will be shared soon.
The paper has been published at IEEE VR'21, Lisbon, Portugal.
Lu, F. & Bowman, D. A. (2021, March). Evaluating the Potential of Glanceable AR Interfaces for Authentic Everyday Uses. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), 10 pages, Lisbon, Potugal, IEEE. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/VR50410.2021.00104
Below is a video for the paper: