User experience research on an augmented reality navigation application for on-demand ride pooling services

Abstract

This work presents an approach of an augmented reality human machine interface which guides users to a pick-up location for on demand shuttle services. This is of importance as those novel pick-up locations are only digital. The standardized human centered design process was used to develop an application and the associated human machine interface. Based on literature and an online survey, design principles were formulated. With the use of Google’s ARCore, an Android application was developed. The app uses the phone camera to include computer generated visuals onto the live video feed, enabling a handheld augmented reality experience. The app was used to test various hypotheses regarding the correlation between age differences in usability and workload perception and the acceptance towards that technology. For this purpose, a study ( N = 45) was conducted on the premises of the German Aerospace Center. Participants had to navigate to a pick-up location through outdoor and indoor spaces with support from the developed app. The assumptions that younger people would have less workload, higher acceptance towards that technology and would give higher usability ratings did not match the results. No significant differences between young and older users were found. However, the results showed that the application has an overall good user experience. Open feedback from participants gave evidence of a satisfactory implementation of this navigation approach and showed use cases in which augmented reality might be useful for users.