Welcome to the Jungle: Using ARTV to Balance Media Immersion and Reality Awareness for Passengers on Public Transport

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) offer new possibilities for reclaiming and improving passenger travel time. Common Virtual Reality (VR) HMDs provide an immersive mobile media viewing experience, overcoming the screen size constraints of mobile and seat-back displays. However, they also reduce environmental awareness as they completely occlude reality. Conversely, Augmented Reality (AR) glasses afford environmental awareness by default, allowing unrestricted presentation of media through large virtual planar displays, but without the same immersion as VR. Our work transposes the immersive benefits of VR to AR, whilst preserving awareness of the environment. We present results from a user study (N=24) exploring the addition of plants and textures as augmentations of a simulated VR train environment to enhance passenger media immersion when watching a nature documentary. We evaluated two different fields of view (50 degrees, 104 degrees) and three different levels of ARTV ornamentation (from none to a fully textured jungle environment in the train). We found that on high FOV devices, ARTV ornamentation results in levels of media immersion that are not significantly lower than those achieved with full VR whilst retaining environmental awareness not possible with typical VR solutions. On low FOV devices, ARTV ornamentation loses effectiveness and distract users. Our results show that the immersiveness of AR can be significantly increased while still allowing the awareness of the environment that travellers need to manage their journeys.