Effects of Augmented Content’s Placement and Size on User’s Search Experience in Extended Displays

Using an augmented reality head-mounted display(HMD) to extend the display of smartphone could open up new user interface solutions, benefiting users with an increased screen real-estate and visualizations that leverage each device's capabilities. Some previous works have explored the viability of extended displays, but knowledge regarding considerable design factors and constraints for such displays is still very limited. In our work, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate how different properties of augmented content in extended displays affect the user's task performance and subjective workload in an image comparison task. Through an experiment with 24 participants, we compared four augmented content placements (top, right, left, and bottom) and two augmented content sizes (small and large). The study results demonstrated that there are significant effects of both placement and size of augmented content on task performance and subjective workload. Based on the findings of our study, we propose some recommendations for the future design of extended displays.