Augmented reality (AR) may provide supplementary information to support tasks in the physical world, offering the advantage of displaying multiple windows with high flexibility in interface layout. In AR-physical world mixed scenarios, users often need to locate and retrieve target information from virtual multi-window displays. Understanding how to design effective layouts for these interfaces is critical to enhancing visual search performance, a key element of information retrieval. This study examines the effects of depth separation, information density and curvature of virtual multi-window displays on a conjunctive visual search task in AR. Results indicate that reducing information density and introducing curvature significantly reduced both search time and the time taken to decide that the target was absent (task quit time). Although depth separation did not significantly affect search time, it notably reduced quit time. The number of errors was not significantly influenced by any of the factors. Additionally, users preferred a curved display with lower information density that remained within the device's field of view, and their search time was fastest with this layout. Finally, we noticed variations in layout preference and performance changes among individuals, possibly influenced by differences in search strategies.

Optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMDs) allow users to interact with both physical and virtual displays overlaid in the real world within augmented reality (AR) environments. When arranging these displays in space, spatial discontinuity-such as differences in viewing distance or lateral separation in the visual field-may occur. This study examined the effects of displays' spatial discontinuities on multitasking performance and perceived workload in AR, as well as how these effects were influenced by task load. Participants completed a multitasking simulation with four tasks distributed across physical and virtual displays under four display configurations: two configurations with spatial discontinuity, one cross-display configuration without discontinuity, and a baseline configuration where all tasks were shown on the physical display. Each configuration was tested under two task load levels. Results showed that OST-HMD-supported AR significantly impaired multitasking performance, regardless of whether spatial discontinuity between virtual and physical displays was present. Introducing display discontinuities through small depth separations or alignment offsets produced no additional significant influence on performance. The AR configurations also shown increased perceived workload than the baseline, but spatial discontinuity did not significantly affect workload ratings. Task load modulated the effect of display configurations on performance as well as physical and frustration ratings of the perceived workload.

In this paper, we present MoiréTag—a novel tag-like device that magnifies displacement without active components for indirect sensing of subtle tangible interactions. The device consists of two overlapping layers of stripe patterns with distinct pattern frequencies. These layers create Moiré fringes that can move faster than the actual movement of a layer. Using a customized image processing pipeline, we show that MoiréTag can reliably detect sub-mm movement in real-time (mean error = 0.043 mm) under varying lighting conditions, camera angles, and camera distances. We also demonstrate five applications of MoiréTag to showcase its potential as a low-cost solution to capture and monitor small changes in movement and other physical properties, such as force and volume, by converting them into displacement.