AR Simulations in VR: The Case for Environmental Awareness

Augmented reality (AR) simulations in virtual reality (VR) provide fully controlled conditions, fewer hardware limitations than on AR devices, and convenient and safe access to diverse settings. However, for VR to be a fully realistic simulator for optical see-through (OST) AR, it must replicate the effects of environmental context on virtual content appearance and system performance. Here we examine one example of this, the perceived transparency of virtual content under varying environment illuminance, and conduct a user study (N=8) to identify the discrepancy between AR and a standard VR simulation. Our results show that for virtual content designed to be transparent, perceived transparency in AR is greatly reduced at low levels of illuminance, but remains consistently high across all illuminance levels tested in VR. This illustrates the impact of environment properties on the efficacy of AR simulations in VR, and motivates the development of context-aware simulations that more closely replicate AR experiences.