Safeguarding Face-To-Face Communication in Augmented Reality: An Adaptive Interface

Recent advances in wearable augmented reality devices foster the vision of ubiquitous interaction in an immersive, digitally augmented, physical world. Assuming that such devices could one day replace smartphones for accessing information, creating interfaces safeguarding face-to-face communication is challenging. This work presents the design of an interface that adapts the information visualisation to the presence of a possible interlocutor while allowing a high level of user control. The aim was to define an interface for wearable devices adaptive to interactions coming from the surrounding environment and expressly thought for application domains in which it will be necessary to continuously monitor information. For instance, those applications that require monitoring patient data in medical applications or the progress of a production process in an industrial environment. We focused on human-to-human communication, minimising the use of mid-air interaction to hide the synthetic information that might interrupt the conversation flow. Two different visualisation modalities allowing the coexistence of real and virtual worlds are proposed and evaluated in a preliminary study with six participants who showed a generalised appreciation for the solution which maximises the display of information requiring less user intervention.