An Evaluation of Smartphone-Based Interaction in AR for Constrained Object Manipulation

In Augmented Reality, interaction with the environment can be achieved with a number of different approaches. In current systems, the most common are hand and gesture inputs. However experimental applications also integrated smartphones as intuitive interaction devices and demonstrated great potential for different tasks. One particular task is constrained object manipulation, for which we conducted a user study. In it we compared standard gesture-based approaches with a touch-based interaction via smartphone. We found that a touch-based interface is significantly more efficient, although gestures are being subjectively more accepted. From these results we draw conclusions on how smartphones can be used to realize modern interfaces in AR.