Technology acceptance drivers for AR smart glasses in the middle east: A quantitative study

Abdulla Alsharhan,Ahmad Aburayya,Said A Salloum

doi:10.5267/j.ijdns.2021.9.008

Abstract

This study aims to establish Middle East users' perspectives on the major factors that impact their decision to adopt Augmented Reality AR smart glasses (ARSG). Thus, an online questionnaire was designed and sent directly to the respondents, and 584 valid data points were collected from individuals living in the Middle East. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlations and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) techniques using SPSS. Eleven hypotheses were tested using Multiple Regression analysis, where seven independent variables out of eleven were confirmed to have a significant impact on the perceived adoption of ARSG. The results indicate that four of the independent variables including Pre-Market Knowledge, Image, Own privacy and Technology innovativeness show the significant impact on ARSG adoption at the 1% significant level. In addition, the results indicate that three of the social and technological factors include Perceived Ease of use, Perceived usefulness and Other's privacy show the significant effect on ARSG adoption at the 5% significant level. Among the 7 social and technological factors, the results suggest that technology innovation expresses the strongest effect on ARSG adoption with the highest coefficient value of 0.413 (b = 0.413, t = 12.881, ρ < 0.01). Moreover, user intention is significantly impacted by gender and place of living but not by education or age. The research also provides pre-market insights on users' personal types that represent who will most likely adopt the new smart glasses and that differentiate them based on their priorities. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to investigate technology acceptance drivers of AR smart glasses in the Middle East.

Highlights

The emergence of new communication technology has significantly impacted the way businesses and individuals interact with one another (Salloum et al, 2017; Aburayya et al, 2020a; Al-Maroof et al, 2021a,b; Alaali et al, 2021; Al Kurdi et al, 2021; Salloum et al, 2021; Taryam et al, 2021)
Most of them are considered weak, except for technology innovativeness (.64), followed by self-presentation benefits image (.52). This shows that early adopters will be among the first to adopt Augmented Reality Smart Glasses (ARSG)
This study investigated user behavior and intention toward ARSG in the Middle East

Summary

Introduction

The emergence of new communication technology has significantly impacted the way businesses and individuals interact with one another (Salloum et al, 2017; Aburayya et al, 2020a; Al-Maroof et al, 2021a,b; Alaali et al, 2021; Al Kurdi et al, 2021; Salloum et al, 2021; Taryam et al, 2021). Virtual and ARSG integrate augmented reality and wearable device characteristics, two widely yet individually-researched topics (Rauschnabel, He & Ro, 2018). Tech giant companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook were engaged in presenting different smart glasses solutions using cutting-edge technology (Elmqaddem, 2019). Google continued its efforts to focus on business and industrial applications, where several companies thought this would be the promising market for ARSG Microsoft deployed their smart glasses device “HoloLens” (Project Baraboo) in 2019 with vast promising industrial applications such as for medical and defense sectors. It has a LiDAR scanner on the right temple, but these features could change in the final design (Phelan, 2020)

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