Analysis of Hand Movement and Head Orientation in Hierarchical Menu Selection in Immersive AR
Majid Pourmemar, Charalambos Poullis · 2023
Immersive Augmented Reality (AR) has become pervasive across multiple domains, ranging from medicine and education to interior design, and other fields. Leading technology giants like Apple, Meta, and Microsoft have introduced their proprietary Head Mounted Displays (HMD), joining the competitive market. This technology offers users an immersive experience by superimposing virtual 3D content onto real-world objects, allowing for various interactions and input modalities. Numerous Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have also been devised for immersive AR, integrating with input modalities such as hand gesture, head pointing, and voice commands. Since the most favored interaction method in immersive AR involves the interplay between hand gesture and head pointing, our research aims to analyze the workload exerted on users during hand gesture-head pointing interactions. For instance, a hierarchical menu selection task relies on both hand gesture (for item selection or click) and head pointing (to navigate the cursor). The degree of reliance on each input modality affects the user’s workload. We applied both objective and subjective means to assess the physical workload. Two user studies were conducted, from which we derived a unified metric to evaluate the interdependence of hand and head in immersive AR. A significant correlation was discovered between the metric and both objective and subjective workload assessments. Our findings provide insights for AR designers, suggesting the combined use of head pointing and hand gesture when creating hierarchical menu selection interfaces in immersive AR.