Augmented Spaces

Navigational Augmented Reality (AR) apps for smartphones approach the presentation of location information in a way that entails much potential to change how space is experienced and navigated through. The purpose of this thesis is to determine the effects of navigational Augmented Reality apps on the users’ perception of their surroundings (operationally defined by “awareness” and “familiarity”), as well as to analyze in which ways these effects are related to the performance of AR apps on currently available devices. To answer these questions, an exploratory experiment, with extensive pre- and post-test surveys combined with interviews with AR app developers has been employed. It was determined that AR users are actually less aware of and familiar with their surroundings than non-AR app users. This is mainly due to the comparatively worse performance of AR apps on currently available smartphones, as the overall quality regularly suffers from a cluttered and confusing presentation, erratic result behavior, and some severe compass and GPS problems. These issues make the retrieved information unreliable and decrease the user’s overall levels of trust into the technology. Furthermore, some initially unexpected issues related to the social acceptability of AR app usage in certain public situations were encountered during the experiment and contributed to aforementioned issues. Nevertheless, Augmented Reality was found to have a number of distinct advantages over other navigational apps, namely the ability to influence users' understanding of proximity, directions and spatial relations, as they present locational information unlike other navigational apps. AR was furthermore found to be a more enjoyable and engaging way of interacting with location information.