The idea behind Augmented Reality manifests itself in multiple technological devices. Their differences in interaction possibilities result in varying potential.

Hands

If one were to create an augmented reality solution for a physical environment wanting to improve work, chances are high, mobile and tablet AR will have an interrupting effect on the performance of activities because the devices have to be held to maintain an AR field of view.

To achieve a non-invasive productivity experience, head-mounted display AR has to be created to enhance the knowledge, task specialization and provide opportunities with interaction methodologies that harmonize with the activity.

A well designed interaction system will understand which user intentions are addressed towards interacting with technology, and which ones are addressed towards the physical work.

Tablet AR can is reduced to access spatially ordered information the environment.

Head-mounted AR removes the barrier between physical and knowledge work. The fusion of knowledge enables a seamless physical execution in operation or management.

Overlapping Field of View Analysis

Applying Augmented Reality to mobile and tablet devices limits the overlapping field of view (FOV). Holding a mobile device within an arms length distance, the overlapping AR view is lower around 5% of what could be seen with an AR head mounted display in the same situation.

1 – Natural field of view
2 – Head mounted Display field of view (Magic Leap One, Hololens 2)
3 – IphoneX field of view within arms distance from face

Scanning Efforts

The illustration shows a potential effort of phone-scanning to be done when trying to find a spatially accessible information in virtuality through mobile AR in comfortable holding distance. Of course, phones and tablets can be held much closer to the head and eyes and thus have a higher overlap between reality and virtuality. However, non head-mounted devices are at a critical disadvantage. For all applications designed to enhance knowledge through AR spatial information display, overlap is one of the most important attributes to achieve high productivity through usability.

~15x	~10x
More overlap through an AR head-mounted display compared to an IPhone in 40 cm distance	Tested longer scanning time to find newly added virtual objects in the environment

Last Edited on March 21, 2019, 9:07 PM. Published by Daniel Seiler