An empirical user-based study of text drawing styles and outdoor background textures for augmented reality

Abstract

A challenge in presenting augmenting information in outdoor augmented reality (AR) settings lies in the broad range of uncontrollable environmental conditions that may be present, specifically large-scale fluctuations in natural lighting and wide variations in likely backgrounds or objects in the scene. In this paper, we present a user-based study which examined the effects of outdoor background textures, changing outdoor illuminance values, and text drawing styles on user performance of a text identification task with an optical, see-through augmented reality system. We report significant effects for all of these variables, and discuss design guidelines and ideas for future work.

Active Text Drawing Styles for Outdoor Augmented Reality: A User-Based Study and Design Implications

“…This paper presents a direct follow-on study to our userbased study presented at VR 2005 [2]. Since that time, we have evolved our testbed to the point where we can conduct outdoor studies using real-world backgrounds (as opposed to static posters used in the prior study) and any number of active algorithms.…”

“…This paper describes work related to the study, our concept of visually active AR user interfaces, our visually active AR testbed (updated since our previous study [2]), and a new user-based study conducted using the updated testbed. We also present results of the user-based study, including a general discussion, and resulting design implications.…”

“…In [1] and [2] we presented results of an experiment that examined the effects of text drawing styles, background textures, and natural lighting on text legibility in outdoor AR. Our work provided clear empirical evidence that user performance on a text legibility task is significantly affected by background texture, text drawing style, and text color.…”

“…We included the billboard style because it is commonly used in AR applications and in other fields where text annotations are overlaid onto photographs or video images; arguably it is one of the de-factor drawing styles used for AR labels. We used billboard in our previous study [2]. We included drop shadow because it is commonly used in print and television media to offset text from backgrounds.…”

“…These were the best active algorithms from our previous study [2]. As discussed above, the input to these algorithms is the average color of the screen-aligned bounding box of the augmenting text (Figure 3).…”