Impact of task on atentional tunneling in handheld augmented reality

Abstract

Attentional tunneling describes a phenomenon in Augmented Reality (AR) where users excessively focus on virtual content while neglecting their physical surroundings. This leads to the concern that users could neglect hazardous situations when usingARapplications. However, studies have often confounded the role of the virtual content with the role of the associated task in inducing attentional tunneling. In this paper, we disentangle the impact of the associated task and of the virtual content on the attentional tunneling efect by measuring reaction times to events in two user studies.We found that presenting virtual content did not signifcantly increase user reaction times to events, but adding a task to the content did. Thiswork contributes towards our understanding of the attentional tunneling efect on handheld AR devices, and highlights the need to consider both task and context when evaluating AR application usage.