Preparing for an Always-On Augmented Reality Future

Future AR glasses will support all-day use, making them applicable to everyday information access and interaction tasks. AR research has helped get us to this point, through technical advances such as inside-out vision-based tracking. But technical achievements alone are insufficient to ensure that always-on AR systems will be productive, usable, useful, and satisfying. We must also design effective methods for interacting with and managing AR content, and we must understand the effects of always-on AR, on both individuals and societies. In this talk, I will present a vision of future everyday AR uses, and discuss recent user experience research aimed at enabling this vision. Our research objectives include the design of interaction techniques that make information access through AR more convenient and usable than today's smartphones and smartwatches, while at the same time not distracting users from what's going on in the real world around them.

Seeing and Touching: Hands in VR

Since the earliest days of virtual reality two of the biggest challenges have been enabling the user to interact naturally with elements in the virtual world and enabling the user to feel and touch objects in that world. In the real world, most people use their hands to initiate and control interactions and depend on the physical properties of objects to trigger the touching sensation. In an immersive virtual environment, we have only data from sensors and possibly passive haptics to use to simulate seeing our hands and touching solid objects. In this talk I’ll look back at research involving hands, haptics, and visual dominance as it led up to the question of whether what you see is what you feel—redirected touching.