Do I Just Tap My Headset?: How Novice Users Discover Gestural Interactions with Consumer Augmented Reality Applications

A variety of consumer Augmented Reality (AR) applications have been released on mobile devices and novel immersive headsets over the last five years, creating a breadth of new AR-enabled experiences. However, these applications, particularly those designed for immersive headsets, require users to employ unfamiliar gestural input and adopt novel interaction paradigms. To better understand how everyday users discover gestures and classify the types of interaction challenges they face, we observed how 25 novices from diverse backgrounds and technical knowledge used four different AR applications requiring a range of interaction techniques. A detailed analysis of gesture interaction traces showed that users struggled to discover the correct gestures, with the majority of errors occurring when participants could not determine the correct sequence of actions to perform or could not evaluate their actions. To further reflect on the prevalence of our findings, we carried out an expert validation study with eight professional AR designers, engineers, and researchers. We discuss implications for designing discoverable gestural input techniques that align with users' mental models, inventing AR-specific onboarding and help systems, and enhancing system-level machine recognition.