Mobile Augmented Reality Integrating Fingertip Haptic Devices and Wrist-Worn Visual Displays

In the context of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), hand-based interaction with virtual environments is still an open challenge. Virtual objects projected on the smartphone screen are on a different layer than the camera-captured images, hence the user's hand cannot get in contact with virtual entities. In this work, we present an improvement to a previously published proof-of-concept that aims at overcoming current MAR limitations by mapping the hand in the virtual reference. To this end, we developed an ad hoc ring interface for finger tracking and haptic feedback, designed with wearability in mind. A wrist-worn display compacts the hardware on a single-arm, leaving the other completely free. The overall system is affordable thanks to the use of the smart-phone as core technology and provides "on-demand" augmented reality, tailored for daily activities scenarios. Eighteen users were enrolled to compare the wristband based system and the standard hand-held smartphone montage. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our system was positively received by the subjects, that completed the experimental task achieving similar performance in the two conditions but expressed their preference for the wrist-worn display.