Managing mobile text in head mounted displays: studies on visual preference and text placement

In recent years, the development of wearable displays has seen a drastic increase. However, there is still a strong resistance to using wearable technology for fear of decreased visibility and attention to one's surroundings. To address this concern, this paper describes a series of experiments that study user tendencies related to viewing and placing text in head mounted displays (HMDs). From the results of two pilot experiments, we show that awareness is to some extent better for HMDs compared to smartphones, and find that users would prefer to place text in the background rather than the HMD screen. We then consequently build an intelligent system to manage placement of text such as e-mail and messaging using computer vision algorithms.?? Finally, through two experiments comparing automatic and manual text placement, we show that our system can mimic human tendencies with approximately 70% accuracy.