J. Edward Swan II

Enhanced Legibility of Out-of-Focus Virtual Latin and East Asian Characters with a Commercial See-through Augmented Reality Display

Junhwan Kim, J. Edward Swan II, Carlos Montalto, and Mohammed Safayet Arefin. Enhanced Legibility of Out-of-Focus Virtual Latin and East Asian Characters with a Commercial See-through Augmented Reality Display. In IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), IEEE Computer Society, October 2026. in press

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Abstract

Out-of-focus effects degrade text legibility in optical see-through (OST) augmented reality (AR). Previous research using SharpView fonts has shown that precorrection techniques can improve out-of-focus text legibility. However, the text was limited to Latin characters, and the evaluation environment was limited to a laboratory OST AR device. This research extends the SharpView approach in two ways: (1) it extends the evaluation to East Asian characters (Korean, Japanese, and Chinese) and (2) it conducts synthetic simulation and camera-based optical evaluations using a Microsoft HoloLens 2. With both evaluations, the SharpView precorrected font shows quantitatively improved sharpness and text legibility. These results suggest that the SharpView font method can generalize to multilingual environments and commercial AR devices.

BibTeX

@InProceedings{ISMAR26-elc,
  author =      {Junhwan Kim and J. Edward {Swan~II} and Carlos Montalto and
                 Mohammed Safayet Arefin},
  title =       {Enhanced Legibility of Out-of-Focus Virtual Latin and East Asian
                 Characters with a Commercial See-through Augmented Reality Display},
  booktitle =   {IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
                 Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct)},
  year =        2026,
  location =    {Bari, Italy}, 
  publisher =   {IEEE Computer Society},
  date =        {October 5--9},
  month =       {October},
  note =        {in press},
  abstract =    {
Out-of-focus effects degrade text legibility in optical see-through (OST) 
augmented reality (AR). Previous research using SharpView fonts has shown that 
precorrection techniques can improve out-of-focus text legibility. However, the 
text was limited to Latin characters, and the evaluation environment was limited 
to a laboratory OST AR device. This research extends the SharpView approach in 
two ways: (1) it extends the evaluation to East Asian characters (Korean, 
Japanese, and Chinese) and (2) it conducts synthetic simulation and camera-based 
optical evaluations using a Microsoft HoloLens 2. With both evaluations, the 
SharpView precorrected font shows quantitatively improved sharpness and text 
legibility. These results suggest that the SharpView font method can generalize 
to multilingual environments and commercial AR devices. 
}, 
}