Effects of Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Position on Procedure Following Tasks and Usability

Abstract

Background Head-mounted displays (HMDs) have found value in industrial applications as aids in performing long and/or complicated procedural tasks. Currently, there are gaps in understanding the impact of various design characteristics on the performance of tasks aided by HMDs. This study investigated how different positioning of head mounted displays affected the performance of workers during procedure following tasks. Methods Eight car maintenance tasks were performed by 20 participants with task guidance presented at four display conditions: above-eye, eye-centered, below-eye and via traditional paper manual. Task times, errors were measured and user experience measurements were collected. Results The results showed that none of the display conditions had significant effects on completion times. However, below-eye display outperformed the above-eye display condition for tasks requiring participants to perform assessments. User experience ratings showed that the eye-central condition was the most preferred display position among the three HMD conditions. Conclusions A non-transparent, monocular HMD that partially blocks a user’s FoV was not observed to significantly decrease overall task performance time. In support of previous findings, an HMD positioned below the eye outperformed the above-eye position for assess actions in this study. User overreliance on the instructions provided via HMD was also observed in this study. In a slightly different finding from previous studies, users indicated that the eye-central HMD position provided the best overall experience and was the most preferred by participants in this study.