See-through window vs. magic mirror: A comparison in supporting visual-motor tasks

There are two alternative display metaphors for Augmented Reality (AR) screens: a see-through window or a magic mirror. Commonly used by task-support AR applications, the see-through display has not been compared with the mirror display in terms of user´s task performance, even though the “mirror” hardware is more accessible to general users. We conducted a novel experiment to compare participants´ performance when following object rotation cues with the two display metaphors. Results show that participants´ overall performance under the mirror view was comparable to the see-through view, which indicates that the augmented mirror display may be a promising alternative to the window display for AR applications which guide moderately complex three-dimensional manipulations with physical objects.