. From left to right are the low, medium, and high levels of visual realism, and a photograph of the real-world location used for the real AR condition. Abstract-In this paper, we investigate the validity of Mixed Reality (MR) Simulation by conducting an experiment studying the effects of the visual realism of the simulated environment on various search tasks in Augmented Reality (AR). MR Simulation is a practical approach to conducting controlled and repeatable user experiments in MR, including AR. This approach uses a high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) display system to simulate a wide range of equal or lower fidelity displays from the MR continuum, for the express purpose of conducting user experiments. For the experiment, we created three virtual models of a real-world location, each with a different perceived level of visual realism. We designed and executed an AR experiment using the real-world location and repeated the experiment within VR using the three virtual models we created. The experiment looked into how fast users could search for both physical and virtual information that was present in the scene. Our experiment demonstrates the usefulness of MR Simulation and provides early evidence for the validity of MR Simulation with respect to AR search tasks performed in immersive VR.
Lee et al. REF investigated the effect of visual realism of the environment on task performance in a search task, by comparing an AR system with VR simulations with varying degrees of rendering realism.
The Effects of Visual Realism on Search Tasks in Mixed Reality Simulation
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Computer Science Medicine