User Interface Management Techniques for Collaborative Mobile Augmented Reality

Mobile Augmented Reality Systems MARS have the potential to revolutionize the way in which information is provided to users. Virtual information can be directly integrated with the real world surrounding the mobile user, who can interact with it to display related information, to pose and resolve queries, and to collaborate with other users. However, we believe that the benefits of MARS will only be achieved if the user interface UI is actively managed so as to maximize the relevance and minimize the confusion of the virtual material relative to the real world. This article addresses some of the steps involved in this process, focusing on the design and layout of the mobile users overlaid virtual environment. The augmented view of the users surroundings presents an interface to context-dependent operations, many of which are related to the objects in view, the augmented world is the user interface. We present three user interface design techniques that are intended to make this interface as obvious and clear to the user as possible information filtering, UI component design, and view management. Information filtering helps select the most relevant information to present to the user. UI component design determines the format in which this information should be conveyed, based on the available display resources and tracking accuracy. For example, the absence of high accuracy position tracking would favor body- or screenstabilized components over world-stabilized ones that would need to be exactly registered with the physical objects to which they refer.