Improved Indirect Virtual Objects Selection Methods for Cluttered Augmented Reality Environments on Mobile Devices

The problem of selecting virtual objects within augmented reality on handheld devices has been tackled multiple times. However, evaluations were carried out on purely synthetic tasks with uniformly placed homogeneous objects, often located on a plane and with none or low occlusions. This paper presents two novel approaches to indirect object selection dealing with highly occluded objects with large spatial distribution variability and heterogeneous size and appearance. The methods are designed to enable long-term usage with a tablet-like device. One method is based on a spatially anchored hierarchy menu, and the other utilizes a crosshair and a side menu that shows candidate objects according to a custom-developed metric. The proposed approaches are compared with direct touch in the context of spatial visual programming of collaborative robots problem, on a realistic workplace and a common robotic task. The preliminary evaluation indicates that the main benefit of the proposed indirect methods could be their higher precision and higher selection confidence for the user.