Evaluating the Usability and Suitability of a Live Hockey Visualization in Mobile Augmented Reality

Sammanfattning: During the last couple of years, mobile augmented reality (MAR) has seen an increase in its potential due to improved available hardware and software. Applications such as Pokémon GO and IKEA Place are just a few of the successful ways MAR can be used in. Smartphone user’s tendency to look up information and data, such as live sport feeds, present unexplored opportunities for augmented reality (AR). This thesis aims to explore the usability and suitability using AR for live information visualization. For this purpose, an Android MAR application has been written in Java with Android Studio, using ARCore to visualize live events and statistics from a hockey game. The user can place a virtual hockey rink in a real-world environment and then toggle between a live event feed where current match events are being displayed, and a statistics view, where the user can see the statistics of the match, all in AR. The application was tested by nine participants between the age 1957 years old, which also answered a system usability scale test (SUS). The SUS yielded a score with the mean 76.6 out of 100, which is above the mean of studies using SUS. The user testing yielded mostly positive feedback regarding the concept of using AR to visualize information, and seven out of the nine participants thought it was a fun way of visualizing a hockey game. The result of the user testing also revealed possible problems of using AR to visualize data, such as information occlusion. In conclusion, MAR is a diverse technology which use has much undiscovered potential. The study indicates that it is a suitable and usable method for visualizing information and live data.