Investigating the Use of AR Glasses for Content Annotation on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have limited display size and input capabilities that make a variety of tasks challenging. Coupling the mobile device with Augmented Reality eyewear such as smartglasses can help address some of these challenges. In the specific context of digital content annotation tasks, this combination has the potential to enhance the user experience on two fronts. First, annotations can be offloaded into the air around the mobile device, freeing precious screen real-estate. Second, as smartglasses often come equipped with a variety of sensors including a camera, users can annotate documents with pictures or videos of their environment, captured on the spot, hands-free, and from the wearer's perspective. We present AnnotAR, a prototype that we use as a research probe to assess the viability of this approach to digital content annotation. We use AnnotAR to gather users' preliminary feedback in a laboratory setting, and to showcase how it could support real-world use cases.