Impact of Task on Attentional Tunneling in Handheld Augmented Reality

Abstract

Attentional tunneling describes a phenomenon in Augmented Reality (AR) where users excessively focus on virtual content while neglecting their physical surroundings. This leads to the concern that users could neglect hazardous situations when using AR applications. However, studies have often confounded the role of the virtual content with the role of the associated task in inducing attentional tunneling. In this paper, we disentangle the impact of the associated task and of the virtual content on the attentional tunneling effect by measuring reaction times to events in two user studies. We found that presenting virtual content did not significantly increase user reaction times to events, bu..