Occlusion Management Techniques for Everyday Glanceable AR Interfaces

To maintain safety and awareness of the real world while using head-worn AR glasses, it is essential for the system to manage occlusions involving virtual content that blocks the user’s view of the real world. We study this issue in the context of Glanceable AR interfaces, which involve presenting virtual information that the user can quickly access as a secondary task while performing other tasks in the real or virtual worlds. We propose eight different techniques to resolve these occlusions. The techniques differ in their content prioritization, automation level, and adaptation mechanism for resolving occlusion. We designed an experiment to understand the user experience with the techniques in a scenario that required both awareness of the real world and information access with the digital content. We measured task performance and user preference. The results show that techniques that prioritize real world viewing and those that automatically resolve occlusions result in better task performance. These techniques are also preferred by users, particularly when translucency is used to resolve occlusions. Despite the ease of information access, techniques that prioritize viewing of the virtual content were seen as less desirable by participants.