Augmented Reality is a technology that has existed in concept for almost two
decades. The last few years has seen the field change radically as the technology
has become more available to consumers, and companies has started to put
more resources in to developing commercial AR products. Even giants such as
Microsoft and Sony has entered into the field with their Kinect and PS Vita platforms,
and mobile handset producers such as Apple has started gathering lots of
patents in the field. Nonetheless, AR is still a very young field and there are no
defined standards of development processes since the technology is rapidly changing
the possibilities and further removing limitations of the technology. Because
of this, we set out to define interaction design guidelines based on development
for the iPhone 4 platform, but with the idea of making these guidelines wide
enough so they can be considered even when technology has progressed further
than what is readily available today.
Interaction design is all about how the user interacts with the system, and
also how the system interacts back to the user with feedback. In a sense, in AR
context, user interactions also encompasses the sense of immersion since it blurs
the edge between physical and digital and sometimes attempts to create a very
tactile experience for users. We have classified our design guidelines based on
this approach and attempted to include all the different ways a user interacts
with such a system. Although our guidelines are in no sense exhaustive in terms
of all the possible solutions available in an AR implementation, we feel that it
presents a good sense of basic design principles and guidelines for a designer to
follow when implementing AR on mobile platforms. One important conclusion
we have reached when developing our design guidelines is that there is no one
golden rule to follow when designing a AR system, but it is very important to
consider the context in which the user is using the system, and the purpose the
user is hoping to achieve, and act accordingly to choose the guidelines and design
solutions that fit best into that scenario.
Augmented Reality is at its core a very human-centered technology where it
is critically important to consider how a user perceives the world in which he
or she is interacting, because the purpose of an AR system is to enhance the
reality where the users exists. We feel strongly that it is more important than
ever to put the user first when designing these kind of AR systems, and we hope
that our presented guidelines might serve as a good starting point for anyone
attempting to design such a system.