Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) is a newly-emerging field of research in the last decade as a result of new technological progress, although it has been discussed in the literature conceptually for many years. Nowadays, it is likely to come across AR applications in a wide range of areas such as tourism, education, marketing and advertising, sports, games and entertainment, medical, military, and industry. While AR applications have been developed to operate mostly on mobile devices, now they are being started to develop for transparent, optical head-mounted displays (optical-HMD) such as smart glasses with the advent of wearable technologies. However, scientific studies on designing usable interfaces where smart AR glasses users can easily interact with the application have remained limited. In this study, an AR application was developed for use in maintenance and assembly processes working on smart glasses by using a design criteria checklist that is compiled from the literature. First of all, the experts who know the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field evaluated the application interface via the heuristic evaluation method, and they determined the deficiencies of the AR application interface. Afterward, interface components were improved, and interaction methods were updated, and then the AR application was tested on a real assembly problem with potential users. Finally, the confronted usability problems were listed. As a result, the design criteria that should be considered during the development of AR applications that will work on optical-HMD were updated, and an updated design guideline was added to the literature.