Augmented Reality Text Style Readability with See-Through Head-Mounted Displays in Industrial Context

Abstract

The application of augmented reality in industrial environments requires an effective visualization of text on a see-through head-mounted display (HMD). The main contribution of this work is an empirical study of text styles as viewed through a monocular optical see-through display on three real workshop backgrounds, examining four colors and four different text styles. We ran 2,520 test trials with 14 participants using a mixed design and evaluated completion time and error rates. We found that both presentation mode and background influence the readability of text, but there is no interaction effect between these two variables. Another interesting aspect is that the presentation mode differentially influences completion time and error rate. The present study allows us to draw some guidelines for an effective use of AR text visualization in industrial environments. We suggest maximum contrast when reading time is important, and the use of colors to reduce errors. We also recommend a colored billboard with transparent text where colors have a specific meaning.

Text Readability in Head-Worn Displays: Color and Style Optimization in Video versus Optical See-Through Devices

“…On the one hand, there were some values under 1 s which are not likely to derive from a regular execution of the test. On the other hand, there were some high values, even bigger than 20 s, which were very far from the mean values (about 6 s) of same previous readability tests, like those of Gabbard [17] and Fiorentino et al [20]; probably these bigger values derive from user loss of concentration during the test.…”

“…Other possible styles, like outline or drop shadow, were not considered in this stage because in our previous works we found that text with billboard has better performances than text with outline [20].…”

Text legibility for projected Augmented Reality on industrial workbenches

“…In our future works, we aim to solve this problem providing methods to improve legibility of blue text. These includes the techniques of contrast enhancement via software, like outline and billboard, already tested with success on HWDs [29,30,31]. This is a crucial problem, because we observed that, if we do not consider the blue color, every projection surface used have similar performance of the monitor.…”

Communications Security in Industry X: A Survey

“…The advent of 5G brings high bandwidth and low latency to enable users to achieve highfidelity telepresence systems and collaborative augmented reality applications [41]. Since IAR involves many 5G-based technologies and comprises IoT devices (head-mounted displays [294]), it will incorporate the security challenges of these technologies, as well as have its own security challenges, as discussed below.…”