Impact of Individual Differences and AR Display Comfort on User Acceptance

Head-mounted AR display devices are getting lighter and more comfortable. However, users may still perceive the weight on their necks and find the devices cumbersome to don and doff, as well as finding them hot after extended periods of use. Head sizes, head shapes, visual acuity, inter-pupillary distance, and the use of corrective lenses or safety glasses/safety helmets all affect users’ comfort and ease of use. While advances in the technology that accommodate wider ranges of users are rapidly being deployed, industry adoption can be hampered by poor user acceptance due to general discomfort.

This research topic examines impacts of individual differences on user satisfaction and acceptance of a variety of HMD devices in the workplace.

Stakeholders

Developers, users, operators, users of AR head mounted displays (HMDs)

Possible Methodologies

Comfort can be measured both objectively and subjectively. Objective measures include pupil diameter to assess workload or cognitive effort, EEG, and GSR. Subjective measures include Likert scales querying perceived comfort, exertion (i.e., Borg Scale or Perceived Exertion), assessments of HMD weight, thermal comfort, acceptable length of use, and general acceptance.

Research Program

This topic is potentially related to another proposed AREA Research Agenda topic on Users and User Experience [Einput-textinput] in that comfort is a key component to user acceptance of various text input methods. The topics could be combined with other AR End User and User Experience topics to develop a full research program.

Miscellaneous Notes

An interesting article regarding the design decisions of the HoloLens 1 to accommodate individual differences can be found here.

Keywords

Comfort, eye strain, fatigue, simulation sickness, heat tolerance, headgear weight tolerance, subjective testing, behavioral research, thermal comfort, environmental factors

Research Agenda Categories

End User and User Experience, Industries, Technology

Expected Impact Timeframe

Medium

Related Publications

Using the words in this topic description and Natural Language Processing analysis of publications in the AREA FindAR database, the references below have the highest number of matches with this topic:

• Marques, B., Carvalho, R., Dias, P., & Santos, B. S. (2019). Pervasive augmented reality for indoor uninterrupted experiences. Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers.
• Lins, E. A., De Castro, A., Frohlich, F., Bertoletti De Marchi, A. C., & Rieder, R. (2017). Interactivity and Immersion Evaluation on Smartphones. 2017 19th Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality (SVR).
• De S Ribeiro, M. G., Mazuecos, I. L., Marinho, F., & dos Santos, A. N. G. (2019). Agile Explorations in AR. IECON 2019 – 45th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.
• Alqahtani, H., & Kavakli, M. (2017). A theoretical model to measure user’s behavioural intention to use iMAP-CampUS app. 2017 12th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA).
• Vaquero-Melchor, D., & Bernardos, A. M. (2019). Alternative interaction techniques for drone-based mission definition. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia.

More publications can be explored using the AREA FindAR research tool.

Author

ERAU Team

Last Published (yyyy-mm-dd)

2021-08-31

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