Factors for Good Text Legibility : Eye-tracking in Virtual Reality

Abstract: Living with a hearing impairment can have a large impact on a person’slife. There already exists many different aids to help in their life, butas technology advances new solutions can be created to further improvethe life quality for everyone. Two technologies that have advanced andbecome more affordable are Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality(AR). A potential aid for those with a hearing impairment could bea system where speech is converted to text and presented in AR to theuser. Such a system must have an easily read and legible text. In this master thesis legibility and user perception are studied for differenttext presentation in VR. The VR enables a more controlled environmentthan AR. Reading speed, subjective scoring and eye-movementdata are used to analyze the presentations. Lastly, some design recommendationsbased on the findings are presented. The result showed that the legibility was affected by many factors.Middle-layers (layer between the fore- and background) improved thelegibility, especially over complex backgrounds. The size of the textalso affected legibility where the larger text performed the worst. Theoptimal number of lines of text seems to be two. There were variationsbetween the preferred presentations, indicating that a future systemmight seek to accommodate this by some level of customization.