Context-Responsive Labeling in Augmented Reality

Route planning and navigation are common tasks that often require additional information on points of interest. Augmented Reality (AR) enables mobile users to utilize text labels, in order to provide a composite view associated with additional information in a real-world environment. Nonetheless, displaying all labels for points of interest on a mobile device will lead to unwanted overlaps between information, and thus a context-responsive strategy to properly arrange labels is expected. The technique should remove overlaps, show the right level-of-detail, and maintain label coherence. This is necessary as the viewing angle in an AR system may change rapidly due to users’ behaviors. Coherence plays an essential role in retaining user experience and knowledge, as well as avoiding motion sickness. In this paper, we develop an approach that systematically manages label visibility and levels-of-detail, as well as eliminates unexpected incoherent movement. We introduce three label management strategies, including (1) occlusion management, (2) level-of-detail management, and (3) coherence management by balancing the usage of the mobile phone screen. A greedy approach is developed for fast occlusion handling in AR. A level-of-detail scheme is adopted to arrange various types of labels. A 3D scene manipulation is then built to simultaneously suppress the incoherent behaviors induced by viewing angle changes. Finally, we present the feasibility and applicability of our approach through one synthetic and two real-world scenarios, followed by a qualitative user study.