WozARd: A Wizard of Oz Method for Wearable Augmented Reality Interaction—A Pilot Study

Abstract

Head-mounted displays and other wearable devices open up for innovative types of interaction for wearable augmented reality (AR). However, to design and evaluate these new types of AR user interfaces, it is essential to quickly simulate undeveloped components of the system and collect feedback from potential users early in the design process. One way of doing this is the wizard of Oz (WOZ) method. The basic idea behind WOZ is to create the illusion of a working system by having a human operator, performing some or all of the system’s functions. WozARd is a WOZ method developed for wearable AR interaction. The presented pilot study was an initial investigation of the capability of the WozARd method to simulate an AR city tour. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 21 participants performing a simulated AR city tour. The data analysis focused on seven categories that can have an impact on how the WozARd method is perceived by participants: precision, relevance, responsiveness, technical stability, visual fidelity, general user-experience, and human-operator performance. Overall, the results indicate that the participants perceived the simulated AR city tour as a relatively realistic experience despite a certain degree of technical instability and human-operator mistakes.

An Evaluation of the Acceptability of Smart Eyewear for Plot Diagnosis Activity in Agriculture

“…According to Caria et al (2020), SE could allow the completion of work tasks with less workforce as it is a hand-free device. Concerning comfort, Alce et al (2015) underlined the benefit of SE freeing the user’s hands from heavy and cumbersome paper guides during a city tour. In a museum visit context, Vainstein et al (2016) pointed out that the SE user can continue to look at the piece of art while receiving information about it.…”

Influence of Personality on Shape-Based Design Activities

“…As in [6], VR, AR, and PR are the representations selected to perform the shape-based activities in the tests, considering for all of them the interaction between environment and product aware, the users real, and the interaction between product and user direct. These representations are chosen again because, from one side, they appear as enough to get meaningful results and their potentialities and coverage are witnessed by many researches in different application fields [20][21][22]; on the other side, AV and MR, the other possible representations, require expensive tools to represent the environment (projectors, big screens, rooms, etc.) and specific resources to develop complex procedures to make the environment and/or the product real and virtual at the same time.…”

A dialogue based mobile virtual assistant for tourists: The SpaceBook Project

“…Field based Wizard-of-Oz experiments (Kelley, 1983) were conducted in order to understand the mediating role of a dialogue based virtual assistant and the level of detail required to support exploration and wayfinding. Wizard-of-Oz experiments are where the user is exposed to a system that gives the illusion of being a working system when in reality it is operated by a human (wizard) hidden 'behind the screen' (Alce, Wallergard, & Hermodsson, 2015). In addition to information relevant to wayfinding, the experiments also examined how information snippets describing landmarks could be 'pushed' to the user, and how subsequent user requests for more detailed information could be responded to ('pull' information).…”