Augmented Reality Design

AR overlays digital content on physical reality (phone/tablet passthrough, or headsets/glasses). The physical world is an uncontrolled variable in your layout — design for coexistence.

Core principles

• Reality is the interface: digital content should relate to physical space — anchored to surfaces/objects/images, correctly scaled, occluded by real objects where the platform supports it (occlusion and accurate lighting/shadows are the biggest realism levers; ARKit/ARCore both provide light estimation and (on supporting hardware) depth occlusion).
• The environment is unknown: variable lighting, clutter, small rooms, motion, public places. Provide graceful degradation and clear guidance when tracking fails ("move your phone slowly", "find a flat surface") — both Apple and Google guidelines emphasize coaching UI for session start and tracking recovery.
• Safety first: users walk while looking through a camera or wearing glasses. Keep interactions brief, discourage walking-while-interacting, warn about surroundings, and never obscure the user's view of hazards (Apple HIG AR & visionOS guidance; Google ARCore UX guidance; Meta MR health & safety guidance).

Interaction

• Screen AR (phone): one-handed reality — the other hand holds the device. Big targets, minimal typing, interactions on the screen plane (tap the object's projection) rather than requiring device gymnastics; arm fatigue limits session length — design short sessions.
• Placement UX: show a placement indicator/reticle on detected surfaces; let users move/rotate/scale after placing with standard gestures; snap to surfaces; show scale honestly (a "true size" toggle for commerce — the pattern IKEA Place popularized).
• Headset AR / spatial computing: gaze+pinch (visionOS), hand rays; keep frequent UI in the comfortable field of view; world-anchored beats head-locked content (head-locked UI causes discomfort and blocks reality — HIG explicitly discourages it except for brief moments).

Headset mixed reality & persistence (2024–2026 norms)

Passthrough headsets (Quest 3 class, Vision Pro) blur AR and VR; see Virtual Reality Design's passthrough section for comfort rules. AR-specific additions:

• Scene understanding as layout input: query walls/tables/floor and compose content onto them — the room is the grid (Meta MR guidelines: "use physical surfaces as the creative canvas").
• Never relocate the user: content may move; the user's sense of standing in their real room must not be manipulated.
• Spatial persistence is expected: anchors that survive sessions — ARKit world anchors, Quest spatial anchors, and visionOS 26's persistent spatial widgets (2025) set the norm that placed content stays placed. Shared/cloud anchors enable multi-user same-place experiences.
• Transitions between immersion levels should be gradual (fade/portal, not hard cut).
• Note on sources: Microsoft ended HoloLens 2 production in 2024; its Mixed Reality design docs remain a useful reference (comfort, holographic frame) but are no longer an active platform target.

Information display

• Less is more: physical world + digital overlay compete for the same attention (see inattentional blindness). Show the minimum contextual layer; details on demand.
• Legibility over reality: text needs backing plates/scrims because you don't control the background; test in bright sunlight and dim rooms.
• Spatial labels: connect annotations to their physical referents clearly (leader lines, proximity); billboarding (text always faces user) for readability.

Onboarding AR specifically

Most users have little AR experience: coach the physical part (scan surroundings, find surface) step by step with visual hints, celebrate the first successful placement, and always offer a non-AR fallback path for the core task where feasible (commerce, navigation). For accessibility in headset AR (captions, one-handed modes, input alternatives), see Virtual Reality Design — the same XAUR/XRA guidance applies.

Sources

• Apple HIG — Augmented Reality; visionOS guidelines (developer.apple.com/design); ARKit documentation; Apple Newsroom (2025) — visionOS 26 spatial widgets, spatial scenes.
• Google — ARCore UX design guidelines (developers.google.com/ar/design).
• Meta Horizon OS developer design guidelines — mixed reality: key considerations, scene understanding, spatial anchors (developers.meta.com/horizon/design).
• Microsoft — Mixed Reality design documentation (HoloLens: comfort, holographic frame) (learn.microsoft.com/windows/mixed-reality/design) — archival reference; HoloLens 2 production ended 2024.
• Azuma, R. (1997). "A survey of augmented reality." Presence, 6(4) — foundational definition (registration, real-time, 3D).
• Billinghurst, M., Clark, A. & Lee, G. (2015). "A survey of augmented reality." Foundations and Trends in HCI, 8(2–3).