Presence, Immersion and Usability of Mobile Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is becoming truly mobile, as it was intended to be, through smartphone and embedded computer based platforms. For these computing platforms, there are three typical display systems used: (1) hand-held video see-through (smartphone) LCD as is, (2) video see-through (smartphone) LCD inserted into and isolated with the cardboard case and magnifying lenses, and (3) optical see-through (glass-like) displays. Recently, an alternative form has appeared in the market in which the magnifying lenses are simply clipped onto the smartphone. The four displays differ in few ways: e.g. wearability and convenience, image quality, size of the imagery and field of view, isolation from the outside world, the real world representation (video or actual), which all potentially can affect the levels of their usability, presence and immersion. In this paper, we examine and compare the levels of usability, presence and immersion as provided by these four different display configurations of Mobile AR. We also control another related factor, namely the amount of ambient light, which might have similar effects according to the different display types, carrying out the experiment under three different conditions: indoor (office-level lighting), outdoor (medium sun light), or outdoor (bright sun light). Our experiment first showed that the current level of technology for the optical see-through glass type displays still fall short to provide the minimum usability, display quality and presence/immersion for practical usage. The other three displays showed generally similar levels of usability and presence/immersion, which indicates that the isolation from the real world, is not important in AR unlike in virtual reality (VR). It is also thought that in the case of AR, the usability is the most important factor for users for their choice of the display type, which also affect the perceived level of immersion and presence.