Doug A. Bowman

Shakiba Davari, Daniel Stover, Alexander Giovannelli et al.

Recent advancements in Augmented Reality (AR) research have highlighted the critical role of context awareness in enhancing interface effectiveness and user experience. This underscores the need for intelligent AR (iAR) interfaces that dynamically adapt across various contexts to provide optimal experiences. In this paper, we (a) propose a comprehensive framework for context-aware inference and adaptation in iAR, (b) introduce a taxonomy that describes context through quantifiable input data, and (c) present an architecture that outlines the implementation of our proposed framework and taxonomy within iAR. Additionally, we present an empirical AR experiment to observe user behavior and record user performance, context, and user-specified adaptations to the AR interfaces within a context-switching scenario. We (d) explore the nuanced relationships between context and user adaptations in this scenario and discuss the significance of our framework in identifying these patterns. This experiment emphasizes the significance of context-awareness in iAR and provides a preliminary training dataset for this specific Scenario.

Richard Skarbez, Doug A. Bowman, J. Todd Ogle et al.

The emergence of social virtual reality (VR) experiences, such as Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, and Oculus Venues, will generate increased interest from users who want to share real places (both personal and public) with their fellow users in VR. At the same time, advances in scanning and reconstruction technology are making the realistic capture of real places more and more feasible. These complementary pressures mean that the representation of real places in virtual reality will be an increasingly common use case for VR. Despite this, there has been very little research into how users perceive such replicated spaces. This paper reports the results from a series of three user studies investigating this topic. Taken together, these results show that getting the scale of the space correct is the most important factor for generating a "feeling of reality", that it is important to avoid incoherent behaviors (such as floating objects), and that lighting makes little difference to perceptual similarity.