AroundArrow: Off-Screen POI visualization for handheld Augmented Reality in vertically dense regions
Nilotpal Biswas, Arpit Singh, Samit Bhattacharya · 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct) · 2022
Augmented Reality (AR) applications often need to represent the user's points of interest (POIs) on the handheld display. Because of the limited field of view, certain POIs remain off-screen. In order to make the user aware of the off-screen POIs, researchers have proposed many visualization techniques. However, those techniques are not suitable for visualizing the vertically spread off-screen POIs. Moreover, visualizing many off-screen POIs (for a dense environment) on the device screen may create visual clutter. Addressing these issues, in this paper, we present AroundArrow, a technique to visualize off-screen POIs using 3D arrows. We use a decluttering technique that uses a system-independent recommendation system to prioritize POIs on directional basis. We evaluated this technique by comparing it with the state of the art techniques, namely Halo3d and Arrow2D. We found that AroundArrow performs significantly better than these techniques for distinguishing the distribution of off-screen POIs in terms of verticality. For the decluttering system, an empirical study was performed to establish an ideal range of a parameter, namely Cluttering Threshold (CT).