DIEM Thesis: UX of Visual Augmented Data Presentations: A Study on Head-Mounted Displays in Different Mobile Contexts
Mobile Mixed Reality Work Package and The Unit of Human-Centered Technology of Tampere University of Technology present a new DIEM related Master of Science thesis "UX of Visual Augmented Data Presentations: A Study on Head-Mounted Displays in Different Mobile Contexts" by Tomi Haustola.
The goal of the thesis was to find supporting information for augmented reality visualization design for mobile environments. The goal was specified to focus on how different augmented presentations and mobile context influences user experience.
The study investigated how users felt about different augmented data visualization and context variations. 30 user tests were executed where users evaluated pleasurableness of different context and data presentations, which were presented to them via a headmounted display.
Augmented data presentations were varied by size and location. The evaluated contexts were varied by amount and movement of persons and objects changed in the contexts. The study focused studying the influences of these particular context variables. The test users were also interviewed to gain deeper insight about the reasons behind of the
influences and results of the evaluations.
The results suggested that users were most influenced by coverage and attention drawing issues related to augmented data presentation. The augmented data should not cover important objects of the environment or draw attention from them as this had negative impact on pleasurableness. The results also showed that the amount and movement of people and objects in the context influenced on how critically augmented data influenced on the user experience. The more hectic the context was higher impact the unpleasant augmented presentation had on the user. Therefore the smallest and most out of view presentations were mostly preferred. Also the fewer objects there were in the context, the more pleasant users evaluated the different size and location variations of the augmented data.
The four main elements of the research were user experience, augmented reality, mobile context and head-mounted display. The thesis complements the academic literature on related to these elements. It also fulfills its primary goal to discover supportive information for design of augmented reality visualization that could be easily applied in application i.e. in the form of context adaptation. The study could also be first of the series of the studies related to augmented reality visualization as they have plenty of other attributes in addition to size and location.