Perceptual and Ergonomic Issues in Mobile Augmented Reality for Urban Operations

Twenty-five years ago a computing revolution occurred as computers moved to the desktop. Today, a similar revolution is beginning that will fundamentally transform how we access information. As computers become ever lighter and less expensive, they are moving off the desktop and are becoming mounted in vehicles, appliances and tools, as well as worn on our bodies. In twenty years imbedded and worn computers will be ubiquitous, and so effectively using them will be critical for the Navy-after-next. They will provide “information everywhere,” and they are going to require fundamentally new paradigms for displaying and interacting with information. An important sub-category of display and interaction, especially for worn and vehicle-mounted computers, will be augmented reality (AR), where information is rendered onto see-through glasses or windshields so that it overlays relevant parts of the real world (see Figure 1).