Interactive Menus in Augmented Reality Environments

Through augmented reality (AR) applications a user can experience and interact with his enhanced surrounding: The user’s real environment is combined with virtual objects. To control such a system or interact with his environment one needs certain system controls, often being found in menus. Interfaces for system control tasks have been studied well for two-dimensional menus in conventional desktop environments. For augmented reality applications one more dimension has to be considered. To issue a system control command a user might not want to leave the augmented reality system, instead these menus have to be available to him inside the augmentation and adapted to it. In this paper menus suitable for AR systems are described. They are categorized in three sections: menus from WIMP environments, enhanced WIMP menus adapted to AR and menus purely developed for AR. Some design considerations are given which have shown to be crucial in developing a menu for augmented reality applications, such as the placement of a menu on screen, the maximum number of menu items and the need for visual, auditory or tactile feedback.