The biggest benefit of drawing these storyboard is that I can go through every detail of interaction and to determine this specific design is good or not under a specific context. Now I will discuss my understanding of the three design challenges I put at the very beginning. I’ll give my solutions and leave out some meaningful research questions to think around later.

 

①Context-based interaction design: remote control or direct touch.

 

Which interaction methods we used should fully consider the user’s comfort. In the AR design where we blend the digital world with the physical one, unlike the touchscreen interaction design, AR application design requires diverse types of user’s movements including touch, type, mouse-selection, voice input, arm movement or even walk around. Improperly using the interaction method under a given situation may entail a high risk of usability problems in term of Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Errors, and Satisfaction, according to Nielsen usability principles. 

 

Before we can reasonably make a choice across these interaction methods, we need to first picture a specific user scenario which takes Human dimensions in workspaces, anthropometry, and ergonomics into consideration. 

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The following four factors matter (refer to Google IO 2018 AR design):

1. The users’ environment: table scale or room scale or world scale;

2. The users’ movement: move around or sit or stand still;

3. Task characteristic: high-frequency or low. roughly selection or delicate operations (typing or writing or continuous selections). continuous or discrete.

4. The position of the virtual AR screen. In the AR application, we enable users to create the virtual screen as they want. Our application should provide context-based interactions with regard to different positions of these virtual screens. Attached on the physical surface or In the Mid-air? Vertical or Horizontal? Close to the user or Far from the user?

 

There are some principles from ergonomics could be helpful for my selection of interactions:

• For delicate operations gaze + gesture is tiring!!!/ typing is more effective

• Close to user: touch is better

• Far from user: laser pen or remoter

Optional Interaction methods: Remote control which requires a control panel. Direct Touch. Selection Device. Handwriting. Typing. Voice Input. Gesture. Gaze.

 

In this case, users are allowed to read while taking notes. So the specific using scenarios would be: 

This user is sitting in front of the table and doing some high-frequency interactive tasks and occasional low-frequency simple tasks. He/she can put the virtual screen in the mid-air, on the table or on the wall which might be in front of him/her. Let’s see how I make the trade-off under specific user tasks.