Interacting with Maps on Optical Head-Mounted Displays

Abstract

This paper explores the design space for interacting with maps on Optical (See-Through) Head-Mounted Displays (OHMDs). The resulting interactions were evaluated in a comprehensive experiment involving 31 participants. More precisely, novel head-based interactions were compared with well-known haptic interactions on an OHMD regarding efficiency, effectiveness, user experience and perceived cognitive workload. The tasks involved navigating on maps by panning, zooming, and both panning and zooming. The results suggest that interaction methods exploiting congruent spatial relationships, i.e., mappings between the same axis in the control and display space, outperform others. In particular, the head-based interactions incorporating such mappings, significantly outperformed the haptic interactions for tasks involving panning, and combined tasks of panning and zooming.