Leading edge : Exploring Peripheral Cues for Guidance in Industrial Augmented Reality Interfaces

Sammanfattning

Users are required to balance spatial guidance, task completion along with maintaining situational awareness while navigating through complex industrial environments with augmented reality. Although prior work has explored both foveal and peripheral visual cues for AR navigation, their comparative and relative impact on performance, workload, comfort, and user experience under multitasking conditions remains unclear. This thesis presents a controlled comparative study of foveal (central 3D arrow) and peripheral (segmented halo) navigation cues in an industrial AR scenario. In this study, we evaluate navigational efficiency, cue interpretation, cognitive load, comfort, divided attention, spatial localization, and user preference. Results show that foveal cues enable faster, more consistent navigation and more accurate spatial localization without increasing perceived workload. Peripheral cues, while being intuitive and less visually intrusive, presents additional interpretive effort, leading to higher variability and inconsistent navigation. Subjective user preference did not always align with objective performance measures, revealing a clear preference–performance dissociation. Overall, our findings indicate that no single cue placement is universally optimal for AR navigation. Instead, effective industrial AR navigation design depends on pairing cue explicitness with task complexity and user needs. The thesis concludes by proposing adaptive context-aware navigation design strategies that can combine both foveal and peripheral methods to balance overall efficiency, reliability, comfort, and user experience in real world industrial environments.