Influence of head mounted display hardware on performance and strain

In high reliable industries, where critical information is often given in real time, Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) may support workers. Especially if mobility is needed, like in maintenance or some fields of medicine, HMDs can display this critical information directly within the field of view. However, in a study presented on last year ́s conference of HFES-Europe we showed that participants react less accurate to a monitoring task presented on an HMD compared to a Tablet-PC, although the information was displayed always within their sight. These results might be based partially on performance decrements caused by the additional strain from handling the uncomfortable and heavy industrial HMD. In a new study we replicated the experiment with the new, lighter and more comfortable consumer HMD Google Glass to investigate the influence of hardware on performance and strain. Results show some significant improvements in HMD technology regarding reported comfort: some visual fatigue items were rated lower and less headache and neck pain were caused by the HMD. But the performance in an assembling task and parallel monitoring task still is worse on HMD compared to Tablet-PC. This implicates that displaying critical information on an HMD might not help to draw the user’s attention.