Moving Between Contexts - A User Evaluation of a Transitional Interface

Navigating between different virtual worlds, interface scales or task contexts has emerged as an interesting research area for Augmented and Virtual Reality interfaces. We have developed a transitional interface which allows users to smoothly move between exocentric Augmented Reality and egocentric Virtual Reality views. In this paper we report on the first user study to investigate performance, usability, presence and awareness issues with transitional interfaces. The results of this explorative study provide initial guidelines for future research and development of multicontext-navigation environments and raise interesting questions for future research.