The Influence of the Device on User Performance in Handheld Augmented Reality

Abstract

Augmented Reality applications, which were known to require sophisticated hardware, can now be run on handheld devices. Although such devices provide the required computer power, the size or weight of some of them may become a barrier to user performance, mainly when the interaction is by the touch on the screen. Inserted in this context, this research consists of applying a set of subjective experiments in which volunteers use an application that runs on devices with different sizes and weights. These experiments aim to measure how much the type of handheld device influences the performance of the user in Augmented Reality applications. The main contributions of this study are (i) we concluded by subjective experiments that users with previous knowledge of how to interact with a similar AR application or a game are able to improve their performance when the device is larger and (ii) we demonstrated the age of the participant was also a good indicator of the user performance in AR applications.