Depth judgment tasks and environments in near-field augmented reality

In this poster abstract we describe an experiment that measured depth judgments in optical see-through augmented reality at near-field distances of 34 to 50 centimeters. The experiment compared two depth judgment tasks: perceptual matching, a closed-loop task, and blind reaching, a visually open-loop task. The experiment tested each of these tasks in both a real-world environment and an augmented reality environment, and used a between-subjects design that included 40 participants. The experiment found that matching judgments were very accurate in the real world, with errors on the order of millimeters and very little variance. In contrast, matching judgments in augmented reality showed a linear trend of increasing overestimation with increasing distance, with a mean overestimation of ~1 cm. With reaching judgments participants underestimated ~4.5 cm in both augmented reality and the real world. We also discovered and solved a calibration problem that arises at near-field distances.