The hardest part of building an AR overlay is deciding what to leave off the screen.
Open a typical AR navigation app and the camera view fills with markers. Each one points at a real place, so each one is technically correct. Together they are useless, because the user cannot tell which of the twenty pins matters right now.
The team behind this study found the crowding issue in a field study, not in a diagram. Walking with real users showed that overlapping markers were the single largest source of confusion. Their fix rests on a simple assumption about attention: a place further away is usually less important than a place nearby, so it is acceptable for a far marker to disappear behind a closer one.
Hiding information sounds like a loss. In testing it was the opposite. Participants found destinations in about a third of the time they needed with a standard AR app, while scoring the same 100 percent success rate. Nothing was added to the data. The screen simply stopped competing with itself.
The lesson travels well beyond buses. Any overlay that labels the physical world, whether it points at museum exhibits, shop shelves or machine parts, faces the same crowding problem. Deciding what to leave off the screen is the real design work.
Brata, K. C., & Liang, D. (2019). An effective approach to develop location-based augmented reality information support. International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
