A Comparison of Common Video Game versus Real-World Heads-Up-Display Designs for the Purpose of Target Localization and Identification

This paper presents the findings of an investigation into the user ergonomics and performance for industry-inspired and traditional video game-inspired Heads-Up-Display (HUD) designs for target localization and identification in a 3D real-world environment. Our online user study (N = 85) compared one industry-inspired design (Ellipse) to three common video game HUD designs (Radar, Radar Indicator, and Compass). Participants interacted and evaluated each HUD design through our novel web-based game. The game involved a target localization and identification task where we recorded and analyzed their performance results as a quantitative metric. Afterwards, participants were asked to provide qualitative responses for specific aspects of each HUD design and comparatively rate the designs. Our findings show that not only do common video game HUDs provide comparable performance to the real-world inspired HUD, participants tended to prefer the designs they had experience with, these being video game designs.