Hello everyone. I'm Hein, and in this talk I will introduce our study that explored
how people with low vision perceived different visual augmentations in AR glasses
in an orientation mobility context. Low vision is a vision impairment that
cannot be corrected by prescription glasses or contact lenses.
Low vision could be caused by different underlying conditions like cataract or glaucoma and so on.
What people with low vision could see is different. Some have peripheral or central
vision loss. Some have blurry or grainy vision. Some have patchy vision or distorted vision.
However, majority of them have some useful residual vision.
One of the most debilitating effects of vision loss is reduced mobility. They experience a
wide range of problems such as reading signs or finding the desired destination
or navigating the stairs or detecting and avoiding people, obstacles, and trip hazards and so on. So
to help with their mobility, some visual mobility aids have been proposed. These aids perform
different things like simplifying the visual scene or providing the distance information. So far, the
results of these studies have been mixed at best. They improved obstacle detection, but reduced
mobility efficiency. Most of these studies did not evaluate the augmentations using participants with
a wide range of visual levels, to explain how they would perform in the wider low vision population.
Many of them did not report the qualitative data that would explain the users' experiences
with these augmentations and how they could be adapted to make them more useful in the future.
Therefore, to understand the experiences of people with a wide range of visual
levels on different visual augmentations in AR glasses, we conducted this feasibility study. We
wanted to find out which group of people could benefit the most from these AR augmentations,
we wanted to understand which aspects of the augmentation that people perceive as beneficial
and disadvantages, and we wanted to further elicit requirements for visual mobility aids.
So we conducted one-to-one interviews with 18 participants. The participants
had varying levels of residual vision; ranging from nearly normal vision to provide vision loss.
During the interviews we showed them eight AR prototypes on Hololens
and asked them to observe the environment and walk around. We asked open-ended questions to
allow them to talk whatever mattered the most to them, and we gathered their experiences,
feedbacks, and suggestions. We implemented eight prototypes and the designs
of these prototypes were based on the existing literature and the results of our prior focus
group study that explored the mobility challenges that people with low vision faced. The prototypes
served different purposes like highlighting the walls, providing distance information,
providing edge or contrast enhancements, or providing a visual navigation guide.
We perform thematic analysis on the detailed qualitative data that
we gathered. We found that people with visual acuity better than 2/60
reported the most benefits from these augmentations. The advantages and disadvantages
they experienced varied widely from participant to participant. The advantages included things
like seeing more details of the environment or better understanding of the environment and
improved obstacle detection and avoidance, and so on so forth. Majority of the disadvantages
came from the technical problems like slow and sparse spatial updates or poor resolution images,
and other common problems like device size or the screen size or the weight or the how it looks.
The participants also made important suggestions on different ways to customize
these augmentations to make them more usable and suitable to their vision.
Therefore, despite some technical limitations many of the visual augmentations were perceived as
useful, therefore highlighting the potential of AR glasses as a future mobility aid. So in summary,
this paper provides valuable insights about the user experiences from people with a wide
range of visual levels and further highlights the diversity of low vision populations, and provide
important suggestions to improve the desire and the usability of future visual mobility aids.
Thank you.