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

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 active AR testbed that samples the user's field of view, and collects outdoor illuminance values at the participant's position. The main contribution presented herein is a user-based study (conducted using the testbed) that examined the effects on user performance of four outdoor background textures, four text colors, three text drawing styles, and two text drawing style algorithms for a text identification task using an optical, see-through AR system. We report significant effects for all these variables, and discuss design guidelines and ideas for future work