Notifications are a fundamental aspect of daily computing, whether on desktops, laptops, smartphones, or smartwatches. On average, adults receive around 200 notifications per day—approximately one every five minutes during waking hours. As Extended Reality (XR) headsets advance, they may become the primary medium for digital interactions, making notification management a crucial factor in their usability. While notifications are known to be disruptive on smartphones, their impact could be even more pronounced on head-worn devices. To investigate this, we conducted an exploratory five-day study with eight participants wearing display-equipped smartglasses that delivered notifications from their smartphones. Participants used the glasses throughout their day for at least 2 hours receiving on average 62% of all notifications on the glasses, submitted daily journal entries, and participated in post-study interviews. We also logged notification sources and timestamps throughout the study. Our findings reveal both practical advantages and significant challenges of head-worn notification delivery. While participants appreciated the convenience and immediacy of glanceable alerts, concerns about privacy, social acceptability, and distraction emerged as key barriers to adoption.

Many work domains include numerous interruptions, which can contribute to errors. We investigated the potential of augmented reality (AR) cues to facilitate primary task resumption after interruptions of varying lengths. Experiment 1 (N = 83) involved a computer-based primary task with a red AR arrow at the to-be-resumed task step which was placed via a gesture by the participants or automatically. Compared to no cue, both cues significantly reduced the resumption lag (i.e., the time between the end of the interruption and the resumption of the primary task) following long but not short interruptions. Experiment 2 (N = 38) involved a tangible sorting task, utilizing only the automatic cue. The AR cue facilitated task resumption compared to not cue after both short and long interruptions. We demonstrated the potential of AR cues in mitigating the negative effects of interruptions and make suggestions for integrating AR technologies for task resumption.

Implementing visual and audio notifications on augmented reality devices is a crucial element of intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces. In this paper, we explored creating intuitive interfaces through visual and audio notifications. The study evaluated user performance and preference across three conditions: visual notifications in fixed positions, visual notifications above objects, and no visual notifications with monaural sounds. The users were tasked with cooking and serving customers in an open-source Augmented-Reality sandbox environment called ARtisan Bistro. The results indicated that visual notifications above objects combined with localized audio feedback were the most effective and preferred method by participants. The findings highlight the importance of strategic placement of visual and audio notifications in AR, providing insights for engineers and developers to design intuitive 3D user interfaces.

As we develop computing platforms for augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMDs) technologies for social or workplace environments, understanding how users interact with notifications in immersive environments has become crucial. We researched effectiveness and user preferences of different interaction modalities for notifications, along with two types of notification display methods. In our study, participants were immersed in a simulated cooking environment using an AR-HMD, where they had to fulfill customer orders. During the cooking process, participants received notifications related to customer orders and ingredient updates. They were given three interaction modes for those notifications: voice commands, eye gaze and dwell, and hand gestures. To manage multiple notifications at once, we also researched two different notification list displays, one attached to the user’s hand and one in the world. Results indicate that participants preferred using their hands to interact with notifications and having the list of notifications attached to their hands. Voice and gaze interaction was perceived as having lower usability than touch.

In health care, there are still many devices with poorly designed user interfaces that can lead to user errors. Especially in acute care, an error can lead to critical conditions in patients. Previous research has shown that the use of augmented reality can help to better monitor the condition of patients and better detect unforeseen events. The system created in this work is intended to aid in the detection of changes in patient and equipment-data in order to increase detection of critical conditions or errors.