DecluttAR: An Interactive Visual Clutter Dimming System to Help Focus on Work

Over time, the desks of office workers often get cluttered with documents, items, and other objects that are unrelated to the work being done. These objects become visual noise. Visual noise tends to reduce the worker’s concentration on their work. Therefore, it is desirable to have an uncluttered environment to work. We propose DecluttAR, a system that controls the visibility of clutter objects by using a video see-through head-mounted display and an RGB-D camera. Our system first generates a 3D model of the empty desk, and then automatically generates a 3D model of each object that is newly placed on the desk. Then, the user can interactively control each object’s visibility which is superimposed on the corresponding real object. Four types of object appearance adjustments are implemented: normal, grayscale, outline, and transparency. To investigate changes in the ability to concentrate in different appearances, a user study was conducted in which a simple arithmetic task was performed in four appearances. The results show that the number of answers in the arithmetic task for the transparent display increased compared to the normal display in the first half of the task. This result indicates that the participants are able to enter a state of concentration on the task more quickly by making the object invisible. In addition, the questionnaire-based subjective evaluation revealed that the transparent display had a lower workload and a higher user evaluation followed by the outline display.