A User-Study on Proximity-Based Scene Transitioning for Contextual Information Display in Learning and Smart Factories

Contextual information display is a concept of lowering the cognitive load of a user in a smart factory or learning factory environment. Due to the increasing amount of sensors and their collected data, measures must be taken to prevent overwhelming the human worker and ‘update’ them to the ‘operator 4.0’. In this publication, an online user study was conducted to find a preferable method of transitioning between contexts if a change of spatial location was detected. The participants (n = 36, age = 22–55) took part in an immersive experiment in which four transition mechanisms (distance indication, timer indication, button activation, manual selection) were presented on a simulated Augmented Reality headset in Virtual Reality. It was found, using the System-Usability-Scale (SUS), that users prefer an highly automatic transition with an indication of the spatial distance toward a change in the displayed information (n = 36, SUS = 76.45, σ = 12.08).