Clutter costs in head-mounted displays: a study examining trade-offs between overlay and adjacent presentation of information

Warden, Amelia C.; Wickens, Christopher D.; Rehberg, Daniel; Clegg, Benjamin A.; Ortega, Francisco R. · 2025 · Cognitive Research Principles and Implications

DOI: 10.1186/s41235-025-00650-5

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Summary

This study investigates the "scan-clutter trade-off" in head-mounted displays (HMDs), specifically examining how visual clutter affects performance when information is presented as an overlay versus an adjacent display. In safety-critical environments like military operations, HMDs reduce the effort of visual scanning by keeping information in the user's field of view. However, overlaying digital information onto a real-world scene can create visual clutter that hinders perception. The research aims to quantify these costs and determine whether the depth cues provided by an actual HMD mitigate the negative effects of overlay clutter compared to flat-screen simulations. The experiment utilized a HoloLens 2 augmented reality HMD with a within-subjects design involving 54 participants. Participants performed two tasks requiring focused attention: a scene search task (identifying camouflaged targets in a far-domain naturalistic landscape) and a map task (interpreting elevation and location data on a near-domain schematic map). The study manipulated two variables: display configuration (overlay vs. adjacent) and clutter levels (low, medium, high) in both the near-domain display and far-domain scene. Clutter was quantified using the feature congestion metric, which measures visual complexity based on color, luminance, and orientation variability. The overlay condition presented the map directly over the scene with a depth separation of 31.75 cm, while the adjacent condition placed the displays side-by-side. Results indicated that while accuracy was similar between overlay and adjacent conditions, the overlay configuration significantly hindered tasks requiring focused attention on the far-domain scene. This asymmetry was attributed to a biological tendency to prioritize information perceived as closer to the observer, causing near-domain clutter to disproportionately interfere with scene perception. Furthermore, increasing clutter in either domain linearly increased costs to both response speed and accuracy. Contrary to the hypothesis that binocular disparity in the HMD would reduce overlay costs, the study found that overlay clutter still imposed significant attentional penalties, particularly when users needed to detect low-salience targets in the background scene. The findings highlight the importance of careful HMD design to minimize visual clutter, especially in contexts where scene information is critical. While HMDs offer operational benefits by reducing head movements and scanning effort, the negative effects of overlay clutter on speed and accuracy must be managed. The study suggests that designers should prioritize reducing clutter in both the display and the background scene to prevent interference with essential environmental perception. These results provide empirical evidence for the scan-clutter trade-off, informing the development of augmented reality systems for military and other safety-critical applications.

Key finding

Overlaying information on a head-mounted display hinders performance on tasks requiring focused attention on the background scene, and increasing visual clutter in either the display or the scene degrades both speed and accuracy.

Methodology

simulator

Sample size: 54

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

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