Ring-Based AR Controls for Spectacles

Abstract

With interest and investment in augmented reality (AR) growing in recent years, interaction techniques—the ways in which users can interact with content in AR—have become an important subject of research. Various kinds of interaction techniques have been researched and are used in AR products, including gesture-based and voice-based interaction, among others. One family of interaction techniques concerns interactions that can be performed using wearable devices, such as rings. This thesis presents our approach to Ring-Based AR Controls for Spectacles. In our work, we designed a ring-shaped device that contains an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Using this IMU, we compute the rotation of the ring around the user’s finger and forward this information to the Spectacles, a pair of AR glasses. This rotational input is used for interaction within the AR scene. The interactions evaluated in this thesis are the translation of objects along a fixed axis and menu search, in which users interact with an interface using the ring. Through the design and evaluation of our ring, we investigated the relevance of this interaction technique for AR, particularly in terms of speed and precision in AR tasks.We evaluated our approach by conducting a within-subjects user study with 25 participants. In this study, we compared our ring-based rotation approach with a gesture-based interaction technique, namely the pinch gesture supported by the AR glasses, in the aforementioned translation and menu-search tasks. We also considered a Combined interaction technique that used both the ring and gestures in the menu-search task. We examined completion time, errors, perceived workload, usability, and participant preferences.In the translation task, Ring interaction was significantly faster and perceived as more usable than Pinch interaction, while no significant difference in absolute translation error was found. Ring interaction also received lower workload ratings on several NASA-TLX subscales. In the menu-search task, Combined interaction was significantly faster and perceived as more usable than both Ring interaction and Pinch interaction. Ring-only interaction produced significantly more selection errors, whereas Combined interaction and Pinch interaction did not differ significantly in error count. These findings indicate that ring rotation is promising for continuous control and navigation, while combining it with an established selection technique is preferable for tasks requiring discrete confirmation.