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Acceptance of an Augmented Society: Initial Explorations into the Acceptability of Augmenting Real World Locations

Alan Joy, Joseph O'Hagan

TL;DR

This paper investigates public acceptability of augmenting real-world locations with AR content and examines how location type and content category influence judgments. The authors built a smartphone app using Unity and ARCore to enable posting and persistence of AR images via Cloud Anchors stored on Google Cloud. A 12-person user study combining hands-on tasks, questionnaires, and interviews reveals that participants favor regulation akin to social media and support restricting AR in religious and cultural sites, especially for commercial content. The work highlights the need for context-aware, legally aligned protections for AR content and suggests directions for cross-cultural research and privacy-preserving safeguards.

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) will enable individuals to share and experience content augmented at real world locations with ease. But what protections and restrictions should be in place? Should, for example, anyone be able to post any content they wish at a place of religious or cultural significance? We developed a smartphone app to give individuals hands-on experience posting and sharing AR content. After using our app, we investigated their attitudes towards posting different types of AR content (of an artistic, protest, social, informative, and commercial nature) in a variety of locations (cultural sites, religious sites, residential areas, public spaces, government buildings, and tourist points of interests). Our results show individuals expect restrictions to be in place to control who can post AR content at some locations, in particular those of religious and cultural significance. We also report individuals prefer augmentations to fit contextually within the environment they are posted, and expect the posting and sharing of AR content to adhere to the same regulations/legislation as social media platforms.

Acceptance of an Augmented Society: Initial Explorations into the Acceptability of Augmenting Real World Locations

TL;DR

This paper investigates public acceptability of augmenting real-world locations with AR content and examines how location type and content category influence judgments. The authors built a smartphone app using Unity and ARCore to enable posting and persistence of AR images via Cloud Anchors stored on Google Cloud. A 12-person user study combining hands-on tasks, questionnaires, and interviews reveals that participants favor regulation akin to social media and support restricting AR in religious and cultural sites, especially for commercial content. The work highlights the need for context-aware, legally aligned protections for AR content and suggests directions for cross-cultural research and privacy-preserving safeguards.

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) will enable individuals to share and experience content augmented at real world locations with ease. But what protections and restrictions should be in place? Should, for example, anyone be able to post any content they wish at a place of religious or cultural significance? We developed a smartphone app to give individuals hands-on experience posting and sharing AR content. After using our app, we investigated their attitudes towards posting different types of AR content (of an artistic, protest, social, informative, and commercial nature) in a variety of locations (cultural sites, religious sites, residential areas, public spaces, government buildings, and tourist points of interests). Our results show individuals expect restrictions to be in place to control who can post AR content at some locations, in particular those of religious and cultural significance. We also report individuals prefer augmentations to fit contextually within the environment they are posted, and expect the posting and sharing of AR content to adhere to the same regulations/legislation as social media platforms.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 23 sections, 7 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Implementation
  3. Application Functionality
  4. Implementation Details
  5. Study Design
  6. Procedure
  7. Experimental Task
  8. Questionnaire Design
  9. Interview Questions
  10. Results
  11. Participant Demographic Data
  12. Analysis
  13. Questionnaire Results
  14. Insights From The Interviews
  15. Augmenting Locations You Own:
  16. ...and 8 more sections

Figures (7)

  • Figure 1: Responses to Likert scale questions surveying the acceptability of augmenting different locations with different content types using an AR graffiti app. 95% confidence intervals are visualized with red bars, based on the conversion of ordinal variables to numeric ranks (1 = Extremely Unacceptable and 5 = Extremely Acceptable)
  • Figure 2: Cultural Site
  • Figure 3: Religious Site
  • Figure 4: Public Space
  • Figure 5: Residential Area
  • ...and 2 more figures