A proof-of-concept study on the impact of artificial hypergravity on force-adapted target sizing for direct Augmented Reality pointing

The performance of Augmented Reality (AR) direct object selection coded outside of the human egocentric body frame of reference is decreased under short-term altered gravity. Therefore an adequate countermeasure is required. This paper presents the results of a proof-of-concept (POC) study to investigate the impact of simulated hypergravity on target's size and distance. For gravity-dependent resizing and -positioning we used Hooke's law for the target deformation. The POC study was divided in two experiments, whereby hypergravity was induced by a long-arm human centrifuge and by weights attached to subjects' dominant arm. The study showed that at higher gravity levels larger target size and larger distance between the targets led to increased performance.