Evaluating Threat Cues for the Enhancement of Safety in Virtual Navigation

Augmented Reality (AR) can enhance safety in navigation by providing feedback for threatening areas to avoid. We developed a virtual city where participants were tasked with avoiding a pre-defined threat while navigating to a beacon. We implemented two simulated AR cues in the virtual city that indicated threat areas: (1) a world-locked cue that color coded the ground area (GA) to delineate the boundaries of the threat, or (2) a screen-locked cue that provided dynamic text to indicate numeric distance to the threat (DT). Participants were instructed to complete each trial by freely navigating to a beacon in an efficient but safe manner. They navigated to 6 target beacons twice (in random order), once with each cue type in place. The GA cue resulted in the lowest time spent in danger areas (safer navigation), while the DT cue resulted in more efficient navigation. We argue that the GA cue was worth this safety versus efficiency trade-off since the loss of efficiency was minimal.