Expanding the Boundaries of Augmented Reality Evaluations: 3 Case Studies with Increased Complexity
On 12 March 2026, Aimée Sousa Calepso defended her doctoral research titled "Expanding the Boundaries of Augmented Reality Evaluations: 3 Case Studies with Increased Complexity" in front of the doctoral committee. The doctoral committee consisted of Prof. Dr. phil. Sebastian Padó (IMS) as chair, Prof. Dr. Michael Sedlmair (VIS) as supervisor and first examiner, and Assistant Professor Dr. Tiare Feuchtner (University of Konstanz), and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Funke (FMI) as second examiners.
Congratulations to Aimée Sousa Calepso on her great achievement
Abstract of Doctoral Research
Augmented Reality (AR) embeds digital content in the real world, enabling easy access to situated information that supports tasks that benefit from contextual guidance, learning, or decision-making.
The current state of (AR) hardware and standards for designing user evaluations often requires researchers to constrain tasks, environments, and users.
While these constraints enable control and reproducibility, they also limit the extent to which we can learn about AR systems when they are deployed in richer and more dynamic settings, as well as how users behave while using them. As a result, much of what we know about AR evaluations reflects controlled scenarios rather than the full complexity of real-world use. As a next step, the challenge is to understand the implications of gradually relaxing these constraints. The uncertainties of real-world environments are both difficult to reproduce in controlled evaluations (e.g., lab studies) and challenging to account for in less controlled scenarios (e.g., ecologically rich ones). This work addresses this gap by increasing the complexity of AR use cases in three different dimensions: referents, agents, and devices. Through three different case studies, I explore how we can increase the complexity of evaluations, and report on the lessons learned from these experiences. Together, these contributions offer a structured account of how complexity affects AR evaluations and provide considerations for researchers aiming to design, analyze, and interpret AR studies in ecologically rich environments.
The dissertation is a monograph.
Important papers produced during the doctoral research:
Sousa Calepso, A., Fleck, P., Schmalstieg, D., & Sedlmair, M. (2023, October). Exploring Augmented Reality for Situated Analytics with Many Movable Physical Referents. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST)
Yang, X., Sousa Calepso, A., Amtsberg, F., Menges, A., & Sedlmair, M. (2023, October). Usability evaluation of an augmented reality system for collaborative fabrication between multiple humans and industrial robots. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction.
Sousa Calepso, Aimée, et al. (2025, September) "Exoskeletons and Augmented Reality: Opening Pathways to Improved Coordination in Collaborative Tasks." IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
All papers can be found here:
https://visvar.github.io/members/aimee_sousa_calepso.html