The Impact of Different Obstacle Outline Enhancement in Augmented Reality on Walking Experience

Improving obstacles visibility can improve mobility, a significant challenge for visually challenging scenarios or with visual impairments. As a first step in developing such a system, we examined the experience of walking an obstacle course in typically sighted participants across four conditions – passthrough, partial augmentation (physical obstacle outline was augmented), full augmentation (virtual obstacles were fully overlayed on the physical obstacle), and virtual-only objects. Walking time was significantly slower in the partial condition. Interestingly, although the visibility of obstacles differed across augmentations, and affected walking speed, participants did not notice this difference and rated the various augmentations similarly.