VisiMark: Characterizing and Augmenting Landmarks for People with Low Vision in Augmented Reality to Support Indoor Navigation

TL;DR

VisiMark is an augmented reality system designed to help people with low vision identify and use landmarks for indoor navigation, improving their spatial awareness and landmark recognition.

Contribution

The paper introduces VisiMark, a novel AR interface that supports landmark perception for low vision users, based on a formative study and user evaluation.

Findings

Enabled low vision users to perceive previously hard-to-see landmarks

Shifted landmark selection from visual salience to meaningfulness

Provided insights for designing AR landmark augmentation systems

Abstract

Landmarks are critical in navigation, supporting self-orientation and mental model development. Similar to sighted people, people with low vision (PLV) frequently look for landmarks via visual cues but face difficulties identifying some important landmarks due to vision loss. We first conducted a formative study with six PLV to characterize their challenges and strategies in landmark selection, identifying their unique landmark categories (e.g., area silhouettes, accessibility-related objects) and preferred landmark augmentations. We then designed VisiMark, an AR interface that supports landmark perception for PLV by providing both overviews of space structures and in-situ landmark augmentations. We evaluated VisiMark with 16 PLV and found that VisiMark enabled PLV to perceive landmarks they preferred but could not easily perceive before, and changed PLV's landmark selection from only visually-salient objects to cognitive landmarks that are more important and meaningful. We further derive design considerations for AR-based landmark augmentation systems for PLV.