Towards a framework for information presentation in augmented reality for the support of procedural tasks

Abstract

The support of procedural tasks is a very promising application of augmented reality and is already used in practice, e.g. in VW’s MARTA app. The design of user interfaces for this purpose still poses a problem to date and is only partly covered by guidelines. In this paper a framework to model information presentation in such user interfaces is proposed. It consists of five conceptual layers which are (i) the physical world, (ii) the mediated physical world (e.g. by some video device), (iii) virtual objects which are spatially referenced and are of spatial nature (e.g. 3D models of physical parts), (iv) virtual objects that are spatially referenced but not of spatial nature (e.g. annotations) and (v) objects that don’t have any connection to the physical world (e.g. information on the current progress of the task). Additionally the six design criteria “clarity”, “consistency”, “visibility”, “information linking”, “position preservation” and “orientation” are given that define how these layers must be presented and how a connection between them must be made. Where possible, measures how to implement these criteria are suggested.