Augmenting on-screen instructions with micro-projected guides: when it works, and when it fails

  • Authors:
  • Stephanie Rosenthal;Shaun K. Kane;Jacob O. Wobbrock;Daniel Avrahami

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;Intel Labs Seattle, Seattle, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present a study that evaluates the effectiveness of augmenting on-screen instructions with micro-projection for manual task guidance unlike prior work, which replaced screen instructions with alternative modalities (e.g., head-mounted displays). In our study, 30 participants completed 10 trials each of 11 manual tasks chosen to represent a set of common task-components (e.g., cutting, folding) found in many everyday activities such as crafts, cooking, and hobby electronics. Fifteen participants received only on-screen instructions, and 15 received both on-screen and micro-projected instructions. In contrast to prior work, which focused only on whole tasks, our study examines the benefit of augmenting common task instructions. The augmented instructions improved participants' performance overall; however, we show that in certain cases when projected guides and physical objects visually interfered, projected elements caused increased errors. Our results demonstrate that examining effectiveness at an instruction level is both useful and necessary, and provide insight into the design of systems that help users perform everyday tasks.