CIRO: The Effects of Visually Diminished Real Objects on Human Perception in Handheld Augmented Reality

Jae-In Hwang,Gerard Jounghyun Kim,Hanseob Kim,Taehyung Kim,Myungho Lee

doi:10.3390/electronics10080900

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) scenes often inadvertently contain real world objects that are not relevant to the main AR content, such as arbitrary passersby on the street. We refer to these real-world objects as content-irrelevant real objects (CIROs). CIROs may distract users from focusing on the AR content and bring about perceptual issues (e.g., depth distortion or physicality conflict). In a prior work, we carried out a comparative experiment investigating the effects on user perception of the AR content by the degree of the visual diminishment of such a CIRO. Our findings revealed that the diminished representation had positive impacts on human perception, such as reducing the distraction and increasing the presence of the AR objects in the real environment. However, in that work, the ground truth test was staged with perfect and artifact-free diminishment. In this work, we applied an actual real-time object diminishment algorithm on the handheld AR platform, which cannot be completely artifact-free in practice, and evaluated its performance both objectively and subjectively. We found that the imperfect diminishment and visual artifacts can negatively affect the subjective user experience.

Highlights

The removed look could cause an inconsistency with the content-irrelevant real objects (CIROs) visible in the real environment, but the results show subjects did not regard this factor as important as the CIRO’s intrusion itself
We proposed a deep learning-based inpainting method for real-time diminishment on the mobile Augmented reality (AR) platform, and evaluated its performance both objectively and subjectively
The qualitative and perceptual user study indicated that the visual diminishment had some positive impacts on perceptual issues in handheld AR

Summary

Introduction

Augmented reality (AR) allows users to see a mixed environment in which virtual objects are inserted into and superimposed on the real environment [1]. Such augmentations are often targeted for predesignated objects that are recognized and tracked by the AR system [2]. Real environments are dynamic such that new objects may appear and inadvertently interfere with the main content [3,4,5,6]. The Pokémon Go application overlays the Pokémon character onto the video captured environment, making it appear as if it is standing on the ground, but a passerby can break such an illusion

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Discussion

Conclusion