Dealing with clutter in augmented museum environments

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) can be used in museum and exhibition spaces to extend the available information space. However, AR scenes in such settings can become cluttered when exhibits are displayed close to one another. To investigate this problem, we have implemented and evaluated four AR headset interaction techniques for the Microsoft HoloLens that are based on the idea of Focus+Context (F+C) visualisation [Kalkofen et al. 2007]. These four techniques were made up of all combinations of interaction and response dimensions where the interaction was triggered by either "walk" (approaching an exhibit) or "gaze" (scanning/looking at an exhibit) and the AR holograms responded dynamically in either a "scale" or "frame" representation. We measured the efficiency and accuracy of these four techniques in a user study that examined their performance in an abstracted exhibition setting when undertaking two different tasks ("seeking" and "counting"). The results of this study indicated that the "scale" representation was more effective at reducing clutter than the "frame" representation, and that there was a user preference for the "gaze-scale" technique.