On-body Icons: Designing a 3D Interface for Launching Apps in Augmented Reality

On-body tapping provides a quick way to launch augmented reality (AR) apps using virtual shortcuts placed on the user’s skin, clothes, and jewelry. While prior work has focused on tapping performance, social acceptance, and sensing techniques, users’ behaviour in placing shortcuts on their body has been underexplored. In this work, we propose On-body Icons — a novel interface for launching apps via touching virtual icons placed across the user’s entire body, and use it to investigate locations, reasons for chosen icon placement, and users’ attitudes towards the feature. Results of the qualitative study conducted with 24 participants demonstrated that people employ a wide variety of placement strategies that balance memorability of the locations with accuracy and comfort of reaching the icons. We discuss these findings in regard to current understanding of memorability of icon placement, placement appropriateness, and privacy, and offer design implications for similar features in spatial applications.