Drawing annotations with 3D hand gestures in augmented reality is useful for creating visual and spatial references in the real world, especially when these gestures can be issued from a distance. Different techniques exist for highlighting physical objects with hand-drawn annotations from a distance, assuming an approximate 3D scene model (e.g., as provided by the Microsoft HoloLens). However, little is known about user preference and performance of such methods for annotating real-world 3D environments. To explore and evaluate different 3D hand-gesture-based annotation drawing methods, we have developed an annotation drawing application using the HoloLens augmented reality development platform. The application can be used for highlighting objects at a distance and multi-user collaboration by annotating in the real world.

Full-surround augmented reality, with augmentations spanning the entire human field of view and beyond, is an under-explored topic since there is currently no hardware that can support it. As current AR displays only support relatively small fields of view, most AR applications to-date employ relatively small point-based annotations of the physical world. Anticipating a change in AR capabilities, we experiment with wide-field-of-view annotations that link elements far apart in the visual field. We have built a system that uses full-surround virtual reality to simulate augmented reality with different field of views, with and without tracking artifacts. We conducted a study comparing user performance on five different task groups within an information-seeking scenario, comparing two different fields of view and presence and absence of tracking artifacts. A constrained field of view significantly increased task completion time. We found indications for task time effects of tracking artifacts to vary depending on age.