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Situational Awareness through Augmented Reality (AR)

Situational awareness can be defined as the detection and comprehension of elements in the environment, and maintaining situational awareness is crucial in safety critical domains. Poor situational awareness has led to aircraft crashes, oil spills, and medical errors. Augmented reality (AR) has been shown to be a promising tool for increasing users’ situational awareness. AR keeps users situated in reality while allowing interaction with virtual objects, thus having the potential to increase situational awareness through providing a secondary channel of information that can be overlaid over the real world. However, previous studies have mainly concentrated on examining the applicability of using AR and how AR compares to traditional methods instead of the design of information.

In our work, we focus on exploring the design of information in AR headsets in the context of increasing users’ situational awareness. It is important to consider how to design information; for example, including unclear and extraneous information can distract the user from the main task and prohibit the user from understanding the situation. Our goal is to understand how to design information in AR headsets to support users’ situational awareness, which will then lower the users’ cognitive workload and aid in increasing task efficiency.

CAREER: Next Generation Multimodal Interfaces

Designing Textual Information in AR Headsets to Aid in Adults’ and Children’s Task Performance

Julia Woodward and Jaime Ruiz. 2023. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3589373

Designing Critical and Secondary Information in Augmented Reality Headsets for Situational Awareness

Julia Woodward, Jesse Smith, Isaac Wang, Sofia Cuenca, Jamie Ruiz. 2023. Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences 2(3):01-15, 2023 doi: 10.55708/js0203001

“It Would Be Cool to Get Stampeded by Dinosaurs”: Analyzing Children’s Conceptual Model of AR Headsets Through Co-Design

Julia Woodward, Feben Alemu, Natalia E. López Adames, Lisa Anthony, Jason C. Yip, and Jaime Ruiz. 2022. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 152, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501979

Analytic Review of Using Augmented Reality for Situational Awareness

Julia Woodward and Jaime Ruiz, IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, 2022. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2022.3141585

Examining the Presentation of Information in Augmented Reality Headsets for Situational Awareness

Julia Woodward, Jesse Smith, Isaac Wang, Sofia Cuenca, and Jaime Ruiz. 2020. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI ’20). September 28– October 2, 2020, Ischia, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3399715.3399846