Augmented Reality for Maritime Navigation Assistance - Egocentric Depth Perception in Large Distance Outdoor Environments

Augmented reality (AR) provides enormous potential to improve navigation assistance interfaces by displaying information directly into the user's field of view. In maritime contexts, such AR interfaces could supplement conventional solutions that require users to interpret spatial positions visualized on two-dimensional maps. In order to design useful navigation assistance, it is crucial to understand how egocentric distances of displayed objects are perceived and how different design attributes influence depth estimation. While previous research mainly focused on depth perception in indoor environments and rather short distances, this paper presents an investigation of the perceived egocentric distance of virtual objects in distances up to 75 meters in an open outdoor environment. In a perceptual matching task experiment using the Microsoft HoloLens 2, participants had to move objects with different (i) shape, (ii) coloration, and (iii) relation to floor to various target distances. Our results suggest that participants overestimated the distance to virtual objects across all tested distances since they significantly underproduced target distances for all investigated design factors. Based on these results, we explored potential design implications for a maritime AR navigation assistance on a ship in the local port area.