The effects of text drawing styles, background textures, and natural lighting on text legibility in outdoor augmented reality

  • Authors:
  • Joseph L. Gabbard;J. Edward Swan, II;Deborah Hix

  • Affiliations:
  • Systems Research Center, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mississippi State University;Systems Research Center, Virginia Tech

  • Venue:
  • Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments - Special issue: IEEE VR 2005
  • Year:
  • 2006

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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 motivate the need for research on the effects of text drawing styles, outdoor background textures, and natural lighting on user performance in outdoor AR. We present a pilot study and a follow-on user-based study that examined the effects on user performance of outdoor background textures, changing outdoor illuminance values, and text drawing styles in a text identification task using an optical, see-through AP, system. We report significant effects for all these variables, and discuss user interface design guidelines and ideas for future work.