Hello everyone, I'm Yi Fei Cheng from Swarthmore College.
Today, I would like to present my work, "Towards Understanding Diminished Reality."
This work was conducted at the Augmented Perception Lab at Carnegie Mellon University,
in collaboration with Hang Yin, Yukang Yan, Jan Gugenheimer, David Lindlbauer.
The main objective of our work was to build towards a human-centered
understanding of Diminished Reality,
including users' perceptions of and considerations for its usage, and its potential applications.
So what is Diminished Reality?
Diminished Reality is a term coined by Steve Mann that falls under his Mediated Reality framework.
Mediated Reality refers to the idea of
artificially modifying human perception by way of devices.
Diminished Reality can be seen as a subset of these perceptual augmentations that focuses
on removing real world physical objects from the user's perceived environment.
To understand this more concretely, we can look at several examples from prior work.
As you can see here, prior to Diminished Reality implementations typically involve recovering the
occluded background of a target object.
In other words, we can think of Diminished Reality as adjusting an object's opacity
and setting it as transparent.
Our work was really motivated by the following observation:
while Diminished Reality is now becoming increasingly feasible to implement,
it is unclear how users will perceive and interact environments with such augmentations enabled.
We decided to address this challenge through conducting two empirical studies.
In our first study, we investigated the question of how users perceive
different augmentations for achieving Diminished Reality.
In our second study, we investigated how users will use Diminished Reality
to optimize their environment for comfort when performing different tasks.
Let us dive into the details of our first study.
In the first study, we decided to compare the standard Diminished Reality approach,
which involves adjusting the opacity of objects,
to six mediated reality approaches informed by prior research.
Two examples include desaturation and reducing an object's scale.
Part of our purpose here was to examine whether the standard Diminished Reality
implementation corresponds with user preferences.
We asked 16 participants to evaluate our effects in four scenarios.
Two example scenarios include managing visual clutter and assisting visual search.
For presenting the Diminished Reality experiences to our participants
we used the approach of simulating Diminished Reality with Virtual Reality.
We decided on this approach to avoid the current technical limitations of head-mounted displays,
and to retain full control over the evaluated environments.
We elicited user feedback through a questionnaire,
asking participants to think aloud throughout the experiment, and a semi-structured interview.
Here, let us quickly walk through part of the first experiment.
We begin by describing the scenario to the participant.
In this case, we will indicate to them that they are currently in a work setting
and given the capability to augment their environment to reduce the visual clutter.
They can then freely toggle between effects and adjust the extent to which they are applied.
Here, for instance, we see the user applying an outline effect to their environment.
The key takeaway from our first study was that there's a general
preference for the opacity adjustment and outline effects,, depicted here.
This result firstly indicates an agreement with
past directions of research and implementing Diminished Reality.
Second, participant preference for the outline effect indicates that
mechanisms for retaining context while applying Diminished Reality are valued.
Now moving on to our second study.
In our first study, we identified which effects users prefer.
Here, we wanted to explore how participants will actually use Diminished Reality
to optimize the environment for comfort when performing different tasks.
We asked 12 participants to perform two tasks in two
environments augmented with three Diminished Reality conditions.
In one task, we asked participants to assemble a block structure.
In a second task, participants watched a one minute video while monitoring
peripheral application windows for notifications.
We performed the two tasks in a public and a private environment.
Each time they performed the task the environment could either have no Diminished Reality applied
or Diminished Reality applied to all non-task-related objects.
In an additional condition, we asked participants to decide
which object should be diminished and to what extent themselves.
Participants could either apply the opacity or outline effects.
We elicited participant feedback through a questionnaire,
think-aloud protocol in select segments, and a structured interview to conclude.
We use a similar apparatus as our first study,
simulating Diminished Reality with Virtual Reality.
Here, let us walk through part of our second experiment.
After introducing our participants to the tasks and various conditions,
they will firstly be placed in either a public or private environment.
In this case, they will be performing their tasks in a public environment to begin with.
Here, we start with a block-building task with no Diminished Reality.
We will spend one minute building blocks in this condition.
Then, they will repeat this task for the next condition,
which has turned out to be full Diminished Reality in this example.
In the last, most notable condition, we asked participants to customize their
environment using Diminished Reality themselves.
They do so by selecting objects and applying diminished reality to various extents.
They will then repeat this procedure for the other task environment.
Here are two key findings from our second study.
First, the graphs on this slide summarize our participant ratings
for their perceived performance and comfort of operating under each condition.
A Friedman test showed a significant main effect of the Diminished Reality condition.
Post-hoc tests revealed a significant preference for the custom condition
compared to the two other conditions for both metrics.
This result indicates that users are potentially open to applying Diminished Reality to create more
comfortable, personalized visual environments, if given the capability to do so easily.
How participants augmented their environment in the custom condition
also provided interesting insights into their considerations for Diminished Reality usage.
On average, participants applied some sort of Diminished Reality augmentation to 29.7%
of the modifiable objects within the environment.
Factors that they took into account include the spatial arrangement of
objects, the amount of movement that was required,
object interaction requirements and functionality, and the amount of social presence.
Combining the results of our two studies,
we present six recommendations for future Diminished Reality implementations.
Firstly, we believe that opacity adjustment works well as a primary Diminished Reality effect.
Our participants generally agree that it is effective,
straightforward, and aesthetically acceptable.
Second, in many situations while users may benefit from a reduced understanding of their environment,
they would still prefer maintaining a vague understanding of their context.
We believe that this is when the outline effect may come in handy.
In general, techniques for providing contextual understanding at lower
levels of distraction may be valuable for Diminished Reality implementations in the future.
Third, users generally felt uncomfortable without agency without over the Diminished Reality. They
desired at the bare minimum and awareness that the perception was being augmented. f
Fourth users were very concerned with colliding with diminished nearby objects.
The spatial context of the environment within their reach should therefore always be maintained.
Fifth, objects that are immediately or soon to be relevant to both their
task and situation awareness should always be kept visually accessible.
Lastly, users want to retain an awareness of other people within their surroundings,
as well as their surrounding context when others are present.
To conclude, if there is one thing I want you to take away from this presentation, it is
the idea that Diminished Reality may enable users to create more comfortable,
personalized visual environments and benefit task performance if it can adequately strike
a balance between diminishing irrelevant items and maintaining contextual awareness.
Thanks for watching.