Researching Usability Design and Evaluation Guidelines
for Augmented Reality (AR) Systems

Goals & Objectives


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Goals:
To research and identify design and evaluation guidelines which may be specifically applied to augmented reality systems. Since there has not been a concentrated effort to synthesize a set of guidelines specifically for AR, achieving the proposed goal will require the extraction of specific information from sources which may not be specifically citing a particular guideline, but nonetheless, convey some piece of usability-related information that may be directly applied to, or abstracted into, a design/evaluation guideline. Of note are specific usability findings from articles, novel interaction techniques and design suggestions in the literature, and numerous usability problems observed from experience.

Thus, the approach to developing a list of AR design and evaluation guidelines will be to collect and synthesize information from many different sources, so that the list is comprised of a structured collection of otherwise piecemeal findings. These sources include:

Objectives:
The objectives required to achieve the stated project goal are as follows:

  1. Research and identify specific research papers which address AR systems. Review these papers for mention of system or user interface characteristics which affect usability (either positively or negatively). Generalize findings related to usability into a list of specific guidelines. Extend the list to include guidelines identified through experience or observation.


  2. Organize the guidelines into a meaningful structure. The two leading candidates for structuring the guidelines are: 1) the framework of VE usability characteristics developed by Gabbard and Hix, and 2) Bowman's User Interaction Taxonomy. Organizing the guidelines into a meaningful structure will facilitate easy reference and lookup of specific guidelines.

  3. Create a web page detailing how the stated objectives were achieved, what results were discovered, and presents the actual AR design and evaluation guidelines in a structured format. The web page will also include a list of associated references.

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Joseph L. Gabbard Systems Research Center
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