Contemporary museum experiences often incorporate digital media through modern technologies, such as handheld augmented reality (AR). However, these often fall short of providing a holistic visitor experience, as exhibits are still thought, designed, and experienced in isolation and fail to consider the user’s contexts (e. g., physical, social, and personal). To address this issue, we investigate leveraging a digital twin for designing and evaluating interactive exhibitions in large connected spaces through a case study: our publicly available handheld AR-based exhibition “Stayin’ Alive”. During this exhibition, we gained insights from the interaction data of 1303 visitors, post-visit interviews, as well as rich experiences and observations, based on which we identify four opportunity-challenge pairs that contribute design process insights for practitioners and a road map for future research.

Remote meetings using 3D avatars in Augmented Reality (AR) allow effective communication and enable users to retain awareness of their surroundings. However, positioning 3D avatars effectively and consistently for all users in AR is challenging since most spaces, such as offices or living rooms, are not large enough to accommodate multiple life-sized avatars without interference. To address this issue, we contribute MiniMates—a novel approach leveraging miniature avatars, which make it possible to place multiple remote users in a limited physical space. We see MiniMates as complementary to traditional 2D video conferencing and immersive telepresence. Our approach automatically adjusts the formation of avatars and redirects users’ head and body orientation to facilitate communication. Results from our user study (n = 24) show that participants experience a higher sense of co-presence compared to video conferencing, and that MiniMates enabled them to communicate the direction of their interactions non-verbally as well as manage multiple simultaneous conversations.

Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly positioned as a tool for knowledge work, providing beneficial affordances such as a virtually limitless display space that integrates digital information with the user's physical surroundings. However, for AR to supplant traditional screen-based devices in knowledge work, it must support prolonged usage across diverse contexts. Until now, few studies have explored the effects, opportunities, and challenges of working in AR outside a controlled laboratory setting and for an extended duration. This gap in research limits our understanding of how users may adapt its affordances to their daily workflows and what barriers hinder its adoption. In this article, we present findings from a longitudinal diary study examining how participants incorporated an AR laptop - Sightful's Spacetop EA - into their daily work routines. 14 participants used the device for 40-minute daily sessions over two weeks, collectively completing 103 hours of AR-based work. Through survey responses, workspace photographs, and post-study interviews, we analyzed usage patterns, workspace configurations, and evolving user perceptions. Our findings reveal key factors influencing participants' usage of AR, including task demands, environmental constraints, social dynamics, and ergonomic considerations. We highlight how participants leveraged and configured AR's virtual display space, along with emergent hybrid workflows that involved physical screens and tasks. Based on our results, we discuss both overlaps with current literature and new considerations and challenges for the future design of AR systems for pervasive and productive use.

The manipulation of virtual 3D objects is essential for a variety of handheld AR scenarios. However, the mapping of commonly supported 2D touch gestures to manipulations in 3D space is not trivial. As an alternative, our work explores the use of haptic props that facilitate direct manipulation of virtual 3D objects with 6 degrees of freedom. In an experiment, we instructed 20 participants to solve 2D and 3D docking tasks in AR, to compare traditional 2D touch gestures with prop-based interactions using three prop shapes (cube, rhombicuboctahedron, sphere). Our findings highlight benefits of haptic props for 3D manipulation tasks with respect to task performance, user experience, preference, and workload. For 2D tasks, the benefits of haptic props are less pronounced. Finally, while we found no significant impact of prop shape on task performance, this appears to be subject to personal preference.

Smartphones provide convenient access to vast data collections (e.g., online shops, social media) within a compact, portable form factor. While the prevalent infinite scroll lists address the inherently restricted screen space, they also introduce navigation and orientation challenges. Users often lose track of their position within these lists and find it difficult to efficiently access, compare, and filter items of interest. To address this challenge, we introduce Push2AR, a novel interaction concept that extends the phone’s high-resolution display and familiar touch interaction with the virtual display space offered by Augmented Reality (AR) headsets. Push2AR enables users to transfer individual list items from their phone to its surrounding AR space, facilitating bookmarking, filtering, and side-by-side comparisons while maintaining orientation through visual links to the original scroll position. Our evaluation shows that our approach enhances user experience and reduces subjective workload involved in locating and comparing list items in contrast to conventional phone-only lists.

The nascent field of mixed reality is seeing an ever-increasing need for user studies and field evaluation, which are particularly challenging given device heterogeneity, diversity of use, and mobile deployment. Immersive analytics tools have recently emerged to support such analysis in situ, yet the complexity of the data also warrants an ex-situ analysis using more traditional non-immersive visual analytics setups. To bridge the gap between both approaches, we introduce ReLive: a mixed-immersion visual analytics framework for exploring and analyzing mixed reality user studies. ReLive combines an in-situ virtual reality view with a complementary ex-situ desktop view. While the virtual reality view allows users to relive interactive spatial recordings replicating the original study, the synchronized desktop view provides a familiar interface for analyzing aggregated data. We validated our concepts in a two-step evaluation consisting of a design walkthrough and an empirical expert user study.

Handheld augmented reality (AR) applications allow users to interact with their virtually augmented environment on the screen of their tablet or smartphone by simply pointing its camera at nearby objects or “points of interest” (POIs). However, this often requires users to carefully scan their surroundings in search of POIs that are out of view. Proposed 2D guides for out-of-view POIs can, unfortunately, be ambiguous due to the projection of a 3D position to 2D screen space. We address this by using 3D visualizations that directly encode the POI’s 3D direction and distance. Based on related work, we implemented three such visualization techniques: (1) 3D Arrow, (2) 3D Bézier Curve, and (3) 3D Halos. We confirmed the applicability of these three techniques in a case study and then compared them in a user study, evaluating performance, workload, and user experience. Participants performed best using 3D Arrow, while surprisingly, 3D Halos led to poor results. We discuss the design implications of these results that can inform future 3D out-of-view object visualization techniques.

Augmented Reality (AR) supported collaboration is a popular topic in HCI research. Previous work has shown the benefits of collaborative 3D object manipulation and identified two possibilities: Either separate or compose users’ inputs. However, their experimental comparison using handheld AR displays is still missing. We, therefore, conducted an experiment in which we tasked 24 dyads with collaboratively positioning virtual objects in handheld AR using three manipulation techniques: 1) Separation – performing only different manipulation tasks (i. e., translation or rotation) simultaneously, 2) Composition – performing only the same manipulation tasks simultaneously and combining individual inputs using a merge policy, and 3) Hybrid – performing any manipulation tasks simultaneously, enabling dynamic transitions between Separation and Composition. While all techniques were similarly effective, Composition was least efficient, with higher subjective workload and worse user experience. Preferences were polarized between clear work division (Separation) and freedom of action (Hybrid). Based on our findings, we offer research and design implications.

"Rebuild Palmyra?" is a multimedia exhibition about the ancient city of Palmyra, its destruction by Daesh, and the question of whether it should be rebuilt. As such, it tackles today's pressing question of how humanity should deal with the destruction of cultural heritage. In the design of the exhibition, we pursued the Blended Museum approach, in which we strive to seamlessly integrate interactive media into exhibition design to increase the overall visitor experience. In this work, we present the exhibition, which consists of four rooms. We focus on three interactive installations in which the topic of reconstructing Palmyra is mediated using new technologies such as 3D Printing, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. The installations helped visitors in developing their own point of view on the question of rebuilding Palmyra. Lastly, we provide insights into the technical implementation of the installations and discuss the results of quantitative and qualitative evaluations.