Locating Nearby Physical Objects in Augmented Reality

Locating objects in physical environments can be an exhausting and frustrating task, particularly when these objects are out of the user's view or occluded by other objects. With recent advances in Augmented Reality (AR), these environments can be augmented to visualize objects for which the user searches. However, it is currently unclear which visualization strategy can best support users in locating these objects. In this paper, we compare a printed map to three different AR visualization strategies: (1) in-view visualization, (2) out-of-view visualization, and (3) the combination of in-view and out-of-view visualizations. Our results show that in-view visualization reduces error rates for object selection accuracy, while additional out-of-view object visualization improves users' search time performance. However, combining in-view and out-of-view visualizations leads to visual clutter, which distracts users.