Designing Augmented Reality Applications for Personal Health Decision-Making

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that can assist with our daily decision-making tasks by presenting information that extends the physical world. However, little work has been done to understand the effect of the layout of AR interfaces on decision-making. In this paper, we present PHARA, an AR-based personal assistant that supports decision-making for healthier food products. In a controlled user study (n=28), we explored the use of four different AR layouts on two different devices: Microsoft HoloLens and smartphone. Using subjective and objective means, we measured their effects on decision-making tasks that occur when people hold food products in their hands. We found that pie and grid layouts perform better on the smartphone, whereas a stacked layout works better on the reduced field-of-view of the Microsoft HoloLens, potentially at the cost of some affordances such as time spent and actions.