Experiencing touchless interaction with augmented content on wearable head-mounted displays in cultural heritage applications

The cultural heritage could benefit significantly from the integration of wearable augmented reality (AR). This technology has the potential to guide the user and provide her with both in-depth information, without distracting her from the context, and a natural interaction, which can further allow her to explore and navigate her way through a huge amount of cultural information. The integration of touchless interaction and augmented reality is particularly challenging. On the technical side, the human–machine interface has to be reliable so as to guide users across the real world, which is composed of cluttered backgrounds and severe changes in illumination conditions. On the user experience side, the interface has to provide precise interaction tools while minimizing the perceived task difficulty. In this study, an interactive wearable AR system to augment the environment with cultural information is described. To confer robustness to the interface, a strategy that takes advantage of both depth and color data to find the most reliable information on each single frame is introduced. Moreover, the results of an ISO 9241-9 user study performed in both indoor and outdoor conditions are presented and discussed. The experimental results show that, by using both depth and color data, the interface can behave consistently in different indoor and outdoor scenarios. Furthermore, the results show that the presence of a virtual pointer in the augmented visualization significantly reduces the users error rate in selection tasks.