Design Principles of Augmented Reality Focusing on the Ageing Population

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) is growing rapidly and becoming a mature and robust technology, which combines virtual information with the real environment and real-time performance. It is important to ensure the acceptance and success of augmented reality systems. With the growth of elderly users, evidence shows potential trends for AR systems to support the elderly, including transport, ageing in place, entertainment and training. However, there is a lack of research to provide the theoretical framework or AR design principles to support designers when developing suitable AR applications for specific populations (e.g. older people). In my PhD thesis, I will focus on the possibility of developing and applying AR design principles to support the design of applications that address older people's requirements. In this paper, I first discuss the architecture of augmented reality and identify the relationship between different elements. Secondly, the relevant literature has been reviewed in terms of design challenges of AR and design principles. Thirdly, I formulate the five initial design principles as the fundamental work of my PhD. It is expected that design principles could help AR designers to explore quality design alternatives, which could potentially benefit the ageing population. Fourthly, I identify the AR pillbox as an example to explain how design principles can be applied to AR applications. In terms of the methodology, preparation, refinement and validation are the three main stages to achieve the research goal. Preparation stage aims to generate the preliminary AR design principles and identify the relevant scenarios that might assist the designers to understand the principles and explore the design alternatives. In the stages of refinement, a half-day workshop has been conducted to explore different design issues based on different scenarios and refine the preliminary design principles. After that, a new set of design principles will be formulated. The final stage is to validate the effectiveness of new design principles based on the previous workshop's feedback.

Discussion of the AR Design Principles for Mobile Augmented Reality Games

“…Next, , also focused on the five elements that were suitable with AR such as using the context for providing content, delivering relevance to the task content, informing users about content privacy, providing feedback about the infrastructure's behaviour, and supporting procedural and semantic memory. However, it contradicts with Liang (2016), who covered six elements of augmented reality such as user, interaction, virtual content, actual content, device, physical or real world and tracking. In this research, visual elements such as animation, video, sound and others inside virtual contents are mentioned, as well as virtual contents such as 3D model objects, 2D design or images, and text.…”

“…The survey of professional respondents shows that most of them are currently developing video games for AR/VR (39%) in 2018 and that is the highest percentage among eight different types of content such as video games, movies and entertainment, social media, advertisement, music, news and visual stories, livestream, and others. However, there was insufficient research on the guidelines of the MAR game in the research segment and this statement was supported by Liang (2016), she highlighted the lack of research about the theoretical framework or the principles of AR design. The principles of design for augmented reality are mostly overlooked as there is little information in this particular part and very limited design guidelines have been established.…”

A survey on haptic technologies for mobile augmented reality

“…The design and development of AR/MAR applications need to consider other populations such as the elderly, or visually impaired to not leave them behind in the forthcoming AR/MAR era. Liang [123] presents the eight elements that need to be considered in an AR architecture such as user, interaction, device, virtual content, real content, transmission, server and physical world. The author also describes five preliminary design principles of AR systems: changeability, synchronization, [111] partial one to one, antecedent and hidden reality.…”