RECOMMENDATIONS IN AUGMENTED REALITY APPLICATIONS – THE EFFECT OF CUSTOMER REVIEWS AND SELLER RECOMMENDATIONS ON PURCHASE INTENTION AND PRODUCT SELECTION

Not only since the launch of Pokémon Go in July 2016, augmented reality (AR) has received a big boost in awareness and popularity. AR-based start-ups have entered the market, and established companies start to offer AR functionalities in their smartphone applications. A new distribution channel in form of augmented commerce has been emerging, although only little is known about optimized design of AR environments due to the limited number of user studies researching the effects of AR usage. This paper’s research objective is to tackle this gap by analysing AR technology in combination with online recommendations, a well-established, ubiquitous design element in today’s e-commerce. We conducted a controlled online experiment with 208 subjects to examine the effects of customer recommendations (CR) and increasingly emerging seller recommendations (SR) in AR applications. Our results demonstrate that CRs in AR applications positively influence the intention to purchase and the selection of products by decreasing a customer’s product fit uncertainty, whereas SRs displayed no significant influence. These insights are the first steps to further understand how AR and online recommendations can be used and have to be implemented to provide customers with novel and accepted sources of value

Auditable Augmented/Mixed/Virtual Reality : The Practicalities of Mobile System Transparency

Funding Information: We acknowledge the financial support of the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P024394/1, EP/R033501/1) and Microsoft via the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre.Peer reviewe

Mobile Augmented Reality: User Interfaces, Frameworks, and Intelligence

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) integrates computer-generated virtual objects with physical environments for mobile devices. MAR systems enable users to interact with MAR devices, such as smartphones and head-worn wearables, and perform seamless transitions from the physical world to a mixed world with digital entities. These MAR systems support user experiences using MAR devices to provide universal access to digital content. Over the past 20 years, several MAR systems have been developed, however, the studies and design of MAR frameworks have not yet been systematically reviewed from the perspective of user-centric design. This article presents the first effort of surveying existing MAR frameworks (count: 37) and further discuss the latest studies on MAR through a top-down approach: (1) MAR applications; (2) MAR visualisation techniques adaptive to user mobility and contexts; (3) systematic evaluation of MAR frameworks, including supported platforms and corresponding features such as tracking, feature extraction, and sensing capabilities; and (4) underlying machine learning approaches supporting intelligent operations within MAR systems. Finally, we summarise the development of emerging research fields and the current state-of-the-art, and discuss the important open challenges and possible theoretical and technical directions. This survey aims to benefit both researchers and MAR system developers alike.Peer reviewe

On the Design of a Dual-Mode User Interface for Accessing 3D Content on the World Wide Web

International audienceThe World Wide Web, today's largest and most important online information infrastructure, does not support 3D content and, although various approaches have been proposed, there is still no clear design methodology for user interfaces that tightly integrate hypertext and interactive 3D graphics. This paper presents a novel strategy for accessing information spaces, where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and interlinked. We introduce a Dual-Mode User Interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime: the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions "hypertext mode", where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive "3D mode", which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. A user study is presented, which characterizes the interface in terms of its efficiency and usability