Virtual Curtains: A Communicative Method of Retaining Privacy in Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is a burgeoning technology that superimposes digital objects over the real world using a device\u27s camera. An AR application\u27s access to camera data can open the risk of recording someone’s private information. Virtual Curtains are a novel solution to this problem that allows users to place a virtual object over sensitive information; this communicates to other AR users in the environment that there is sensitive information on the other side of the camera as well as blocking the information from being seen. We propose a user study of this technology to investigate potential users\u27 perspectives on the design of Virtual Curtains. We created three versions of the program to evaluate if a change in transparency effectively communicates to the user that information is private. We expect that the user study will demonstrate that people prefer to have the Virtual Curtains on when using AR. We also believe that having no transparency change will benefit the program, as it may be less distracting to a user that is using another AR application simultaneously