Improving Symbol Salience in Augmented Reality
Maria Beatriz Carmo, Ana Paula Cláudio, António Ferreira, Ana Paula Afonso, Raúl Simplício · 2013
In augmented reality applications, users may experience difficulty in finding virtual symbols placed over images of the real world whenever the colour of the surrounding background becomes similar to the symbols’ colour. We investigated a set of adaptations to make virtual symbols more salient from the background, while maintaining the original semantics, and conducted a study to evaluate user preferences about the adaptations, which revealed that adding a border to the symbols was favoured by the majority of the participants. Next came colour luminosity adjustment and changing the colour of the letters inside the symbol; however the latter was only preferred against symbols with no adaptation, that is, it was never chosen when competing with the other adaptations. Enlarging the symbol was the least selected adaptation, followed by having no adaptation at all. These results suggest using adaptations based on border addition and colour luminosity adjustments in the representation of virtual symbols for augmented reality.