Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) is a useful tool for procedural tasks as virtual instructions can be co-located with the physical task. Predictive cue annotations have been utilized to further enhance user performance through SAR. These predictive cues have only been measured under ordinary circumstances. This paper aims to investigate predictive cues under a sub-optimal scenario by depriving users of sleep. Sleep deprivation is a common form of fatigue, which is known to have serious detriments on user performance. Based upon existing sleep literature, we expected predictive cue performance to degrade over time with sharp declines during the early hours of the morning. Despite these drops in performance, we hypothesized that having a predictive cue would benefit user performance in comparison to no cue. Results from a 62-hour sleep deprivation experiment indicated that providing SAR predictive cues was beneficial throughout sleep deprivation. Furthermore, having no predictive cue caused accuracy to decline earlier in the sleep deprivation period. From the predictive cues outlined in this paper, the line cue maintained the fastest response time and was least impacted by early morning performance declines.

Sleep deprivation is known to have serious deleterious effects on executive functioning and job performance. Augmented reality has an ability to place pertinent information at the fore, guiding visual focus and reducing instructional complexity. This paper presents a study to explore how spatial augmented reality instructions impact procedural task performance on sleep deprived users. The user study was conducted to examine performance on a procedural task at six time points over the course of a night of total sleep deprivation. Tasks were provided either by spatial augmented reality-based projections or on an adjacent monitor. The results indicate that participant errors significantly increased with the monitor condition when sleep deprived. The augmented reality condition exhibited a positive influence with participant errors and completion time having no significant increase when sleep deprived. The results of our study show that spatial augmented reality is an effective sleep deprivation countermeasure under laboratory conditions.