The ARgus Designer: Supporting experts while conducting user studies of AR/MR applications

Augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) applications have gained momentum the past couple of years among researchers. Even though many approaches have addressed the challenges and opportunities of evaluating such applications and some have even used these technologies as evaluation methods, only a few attempts have been made in creating tools to support their overall evaluation process. This work aims to contribute to this gap by proposing the ARgus Designer System whose objective is to assist evaluators in conducting user studies for assessing the usability and User Experience of AR/MR applications. In the proposed evaluation tool, the experts' cognition is enhanced in real-time during testing with various metrics and features, while wearing an MR device (specifically the HoloLens 2), in an effort to facilitate the evaluation process. Focusing primarily on the domain of prototyping for Intelligent Environments (IEs), the first instantiation of the envisioned system augments the user's surroundings by overlaying virtual interactive artifacts, 3D objects and digital user interfaces (UIs) on top of the real-world environment, while at the same time enhancing the evaluators' field of view by projecting experiment-related data.