Abstract

The design of user interfaces in virtual and augmented reality applications exposes new challenges over conventional 2D interface design. Particularly significant among these challenges are high levels of noise in interactions, uncertainty over the deployment setting of applications and a general lack of established design guidance.

This talk explores the potential for a probabilistic treatment to mitigate and address these various challenges. We describe two studies that apply emerging principles of probabilistic user interface design to improve user performance and experience in virtual and augmented reality applications. The first study examines the design, implementation and testing of a text entry system specifically tailored to use on an augmented reality head mounted display. The second study examines interface feature refinement using crowdsourcing and probabilistic optimisation.