Exploring the Effect of Size on Viewers’ Perception of Augmented Reality Objects on Mobile Devices
Zhenan Tian, Martin Traunmueller, Petros Koutsolampros, Ava Fatah gen. Schieck · IntechOpen eBooks · 2025
Augmented reality (AR) has rapidly evolved and is increasingly being integrated into various industries, such as retail, education, and entertainment. One of the aims is to enhance the sense of reality by superimposing augmented digital objects onto the natural environment rather than replacing it. Therefore, integrating “realistically” digital AR objects with the physical environment becomes an essential factor for its success. Besides head-mounted displays, most AR applications run on mobile devices and take advantage of the widely distributed base of hardware, leading to user experience challenges due to scenery and augmentation distortion. While most current research on AR user experience addresses some aspects of user perception within optical see-through augmented reality, there is an existing gap in existing literature on the visual properties that affect user’s perception of objects’ size in AR experiences on mobile devices. To bridge this gap, this paper presents four experiments using an AR application that was developed on a mobile device and tested by two sets of participant groups. The experiments focused on four visual aspects of AR experiences that impact the perception of object size, including (1) background, (2) grouping of AR objects, (3) observing distance, and (4) observing perspective. The results show that grouping, the observing distance, and the observing perspective can affect the user’s size perception of augmented objects, whereas the background on which the digital objects are superimposed has no such effect. This study advances knowledge on the effect of visual aspects on the perception of objects’ size in mobile AR.