ARcoustic: A Mobile Augmented Reality System for Seeing Out-of-View Traffic

Locating out-of-view vehicles can help pedestrians to avoid critical traffic encounters. Some previous approaches focused solely on visualising out-of-view objects, neglecting their localisation and limitations. Other methods rely on continuous camera-based localisation, raising privacy concerns. Hence, we propose the ARcoustic system, which utilises a microphone array for nearby moving vehicle localisation and visualises nearby out-of-view vehicles to support pedestrians. First, we present the implementation of our sonic-based localisation and discuss the current technical limitations. Next, we present a user study (n=18) in which we compared two state-of-the-art visualisation techniques (Radar3D, CompassbAR) to a baseline without any visualisation. Results show that both techniques present too much information, resulting in below-average user experience and longer response times. Therefore, we introduce a novel visualisation technique that aligns with the technical localisation limitations and meets pedestrians' preferences for effective visualisation, as demonstrated in the second user study (n=16). Lastly, we conduct a small field study (n=8) testing our ARcoustic system under realistic conditions. Our work shows that out-of-view object visualisations must align with the underlying localisation technology and fit the concrete application scenario.