The emergence of augmented reality (AR) is reshaping how people
can observe and interact with their physical world and digital
content. Virtual instructions provided by see-through AR can
greatly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of physical tasks,
but the cost of content authoring in previous research calls for
more utilization of legacy information in AR. Web information is
a great source hosting a wide range of legacy and instructional
resources, yet current web browsing experience in AR headsets has
not exploited the advantage of 3D immersive space mixing the real
and virtual environments.
Instead of creating new AR content or transforming from legacy
resources, this research investigates how to better present web
interfaces in AR headsets, especially in a physical task
instruction context. A new approach multi-view AR web interfaces
is proposed, which suggests separating web components into
multiple panels that can be freely arranged in the user's
surrounding 3D space. The separation and arrangement would allow
more flexible combination of web content from multiple sources
and with other AR applications in the user's field of view.
This thesis presents a remote and self-guided elicitation user
study with 15 participants that derives layout arrangement
preferences of the proposed multi-view interfaces. The study uses
a VR system developed to simulate three scenarios of performing
real-world tasks instructed by multi-view AR web content
involving different types of media. The study analyzes how users
arrange such web interfaces, and the system also simulates
various physical environments and general AR applications to
investigate their impact on the virtual interface arrangement.
According to participant survey responses and interface
arrangement data, the study identifies patterns in interface
layout, grouping relationships between interfaces, physical
environment constraints, and relationships between web interfaces
and general applications. Then five implementation strategies are
suggested based on the design preference findings
