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Understanding Low Vision People's Visual Perception on Commercial Augmented Reality Glasses

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

People with low vision have a visual impairment that affects their ability to perform daily activities. Unlike blind people, low vision people have functional vision and can potentially benefit from smart glasses that provide dynamic, always-available visual information. We sought to determine what low vision people could see on mainstream commercial augmented reality (AR) glasses, despite their visual limitations and the device's constraints. We conducted a study with 20 low vision participants and 18 sighted controls, asking them to identify virtual shapes and text in different sizes, colors, and thicknesses. We also evaluated their ability to see the virtual elements while walking. We found that low vision participants were able to identify basic shapes and read short phrases on the glasses while sitting and walking. Identifying virtual elements had a similar effect on low vision and sighted people's walking speed, slowing it down slightly. Our study yielded preliminary evidence that mainstream AR glasses can be powerful accessibility tools. We derive guidelines for presenting visual output for low vision people and discuss opportunities for accessibility applications on this platform.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2017
7138 pages
ISBN:9781450346559
DOI:10.1145/3025453
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 May 2017

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  1. accessibility
  2. augmented reality
  3. low vision
  4. user study

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CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
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  • (2024)Low Vision Boxing: Participatory Design of Adaptive Kickboxing Experiences with Low Vision PersonProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675619(1-18)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)CookAR: Affordance Augmentations in Wearable AR to Support Kitchen Tool Interactions for People with Low VisionProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676449(1-16)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Barriers to Photosensitive Accessibility in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642635(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Exploring the Design Space of Optical See-through AR Head-Mounted Displays to Support First Responders in the FieldProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642195(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Assistive AR Glasses for People with Vision Impairments2024 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct64951.2024.00102(383-384)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
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  • (2023)Review of Augmented Reality Glasses that Benefits those who have Impaired EyesightJournal of Information Technology and Digital World10.36548/jitdw.2023.4.0035:4(362-374)Online publication date: Dec-2023
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