Spotlight on Off-Screen Points of Interest in Handheld Augmented Reality

Abstract

Navigating Augmented Reality (AR) environments with a handheld device often requires users to access digital contents (i.e. Points of Interests - POIs) associated with physical objects outside the field of view of the device's camera. Halo3D is a technique that displays the location of off-screen POIs as halos (arcs) along the edges of the screen. Halo3D reduces clutter by aggregating POIs but has not been evaluated. The results of a first experiment show that an enhanced version of Halo3D was 18% faster than the focus+context technique AroundPlot* for pointing at a POI, and perceived as 34% less intrusive than the arrow-based technique Arrow2D. The results of a second experiment in more realistic settings reveal that two variants of Halo3D that show the spatial distribution of POIs in clusters (1) enable an effective understanding of the off-screen environment and (2) require less effort than AroundPlot* to find POIs in the environment.