Helen Stefanidi

Recent advancements in augmented reality (AR) technologies have brought us closer to the vision of everyday ubiquitous computing and pervasive AR use. State-of-the-art AR glasses now enable mobile, on-the-move experiences that extend beyond laboratory settings. This promise has already been explored across diverse mobile contexts, including transportation, entertainment, shopping, and tourism. This workshop focuses on AR on-the-move, examining how AR can support interaction in dynamic settings where environmental and social contexts shift rapidly and users are in locomotion. We will discuss both the unique challenges and the rich opportunities such scenarios present for meaningful augmentation and new forms of interaction. By uniting established scholars and emerging researchers from across HCI, this workshop seeks to map out critical directions for future inquiry. Through hands-on activities and reflection, participants will collectively identify key opportunities, challenges, and next steps for advancing research on AR on-the-move.

Even though recent technological advancements have led to a growing interest in Augmented Reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), their actual deployment in everyday, outdoor and on-the-move applications remains uncertain. Most AR research is conducted in controlled laboratory settings, leaving a gap in our understanding of AR’s potentials and complexities in real-world environments. This paper explores the social aspects surrounding AR use in public spaces, by investigating the use of AR HMDs during two distinct use cases: shopping at a farmers market and outdoor presentations. Based on the analysis of observations and interviews with participants, passersby and vendors, we explore social impact of AR and share methodological and technological insights. We contribute seven lessons learned for researchers conducting AR studies in-the-wild. Our findings show that the current understanding of non-users should be revisited for in-the-wild AR studies. Furthermore, current AR HMDs lack social components, inducing awkwardness in social situations, which might fade with continuous exposure.

Due to the continuous improvement of Augmented Reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), these devices are bound to be increasingly integrated into our daily routines. So far, a major focus of AR research has been on indoor usage and deployment. However, since seamlessly supporting users in their activities while being on-the-move in various outdoor contexts becomes increasingly important, there is a need to investigate the current state-of-the-art of AR technologies while people are in motion outdoors. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review of pertinent HCI publications, specifically looking into applications concerning vulnerable road users. We identify the contexts in which such technologies have been researched, prevailing challenges in the field, and applied methodological approaches. Our findings show that most contributions address pedestrians, a shift towards HMDs, and a prevalence of lab studies due to technology limitations. Based on our findings, we discuss trends, existing gaps and opportunities for future research.

The emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies has revolutionized the way information can be presented, offering novel opportunities for data visualization and enhanced interactivity. However, investigating AR concepts outdoors, especially on-the-move, has proven to be a challenging task. Although previous work has examined use cases for using AR for everyday activities in urban environments, most of the contexts explored with people being on-the-move outdoors are in a conceptual stage and these contexts mainly regard AR from a utilitarian perspective. This thesis’ goal is to design and evaluate meaningful AR concepts that intend to assist people while on-the-move in a context sensitive and personalized manner, hoping to empower them by leveraging new forms of interaction while merging the virtual and physical world. I aim to contribute an overview of the design space for AR, while people are on-the-move, provide insights for meaningful AR visualizations, and establish design guidelines for such concepts.

Augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) applications have gained momentum the past couple of years among researchers. Even though many approaches have addressed the challenges and opportunities of evaluating such applications and some have even used these technologies as evaluation methods, only a few attempts have been made in creating tools to support their overall evaluation process. This work aims to contribute to this gap by proposing the ARgus Designer System whose objective is to assist evaluators in conducting user studies for assessing the usability and User Experience of AR/MR applications. In the proposed evaluation tool, the experts' cognition is enhanced in real-time during testing with various metrics and features, while wearing an MR device (specifically the HoloLens 2), in an effort to facilitate the evaluation process. Focusing primarily on the domain of prototyping for Intelligent Environments (IEs), the first instantiation of the envisioned system augments the user's surroundings by overlaying virtual interactive artifacts, 3D objects and digital user interfaces (UIs) on top of the real-world environment, while at the same time enhancing the evaluators' field of view by projecting experiment-related data.