The Effects of Visual Realism on Search Tasks in Mixed Reality Simulation

Abstract

Fig. 1. From left to right are the low, medium, and high levels of visual realism, and a photograph of the real-world location used for the real AR condition.Abstract-In this paper, we investigate the validity of Mixed Reality (MR) Simulation by conducting an experiment studying the effects of the visual realism of the simulated environment on various search tasks in Augmented Reality (AR). MR Simulation is a practical approach to conducting controlled and repeatable user experiments in MR, including AR. This approach uses a high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) display system to simulate a wide range of equal or lower fidelity displays from the MR continuum, for the express purpose of conducting user experiments. For the experiment, we created three virtual models of a real-world location, each with a different perceived level of visual realism. We designed and executed an AR experiment using the real-world location and repeated the experiment within VR using the three virtual models we created. The experiment looked into how fast users could search for both physical and virtual information that was present in the scene. Our experiment demonstrates the usefulness of MR Simulation and provides early evidence for the validity of MR Simulation with respect to AR search tasks performed in immersive VR.

FIJI: A Framework for the Immersion-Journalism Intersection

“…This quality addresses a broad range of aspects, including display resolution (Ni et al, 2006), visual realism (Lee et al, 2013), visual complexity (Ragan et al, 2015), and many others. For more in-depth discussions of the components of immersion, and system fidelity in general, we recommend reading Bowman and McMahan (2007), McMahan (2011, McMahan et al (2012), Ragan et al (2015), and McMahan and Herrera (2016).…”

Relative Effects of Real-world and Virtual-World Latency on an Augmented Reality Training Task: An AR Simulation Experiment

“…Mild tracking artifacts did not have a significant overall task effect, but older participants appeared to cope worse with them. Moreover, Lee et al (2013) investigated the validity of the MR simulation concept for various search tasks. They conducted an experiment to study the effects of multiple levels of visual realism in AR for simulated environments.…”

“…In addition, current AR systems have many limitations in terms of tracking quality, field of view (FOV), and display quality, so the results of such experiments might not be generalizable to high-performance AR systems of the future. For these reasons, we chose to run our experiments in virtual reality (VR), using the concept of AR simulation (Lee et al, 2010(Lee et al, , 2013Bowman et al, 2012). We used a high-end VR display and tracking system to simulate various AR system configurations, maintaining experimental control, and reducing the dependence of the results on system limitations.…”

Mixed reality simulation with physical mobile display devices

“…Lee et al [9,11], studied mixed reality simulation via several application and validation studies. In their implementation, a user was immersed in a virtual world by wearing a tracked head-mounted display and interacting with a tracked wand.…”

“…Additionally, realworld noise might affect crucial components of the AR system such as localization and registration, inhibiting accurate user data. MR simulation [11] can be used to overcome the traditional issues with mixed reality user studies by allowing systematic control over these variables.…”