Technology Acceptance of Augmented Reality and Wearable Technologies

Abstract

Augmented Reality and Wearables are the recent media and computing technologies, similar, but different from established technologies, even mobile computing and virtual reality. Numerous proposals for measuring technology acceptance exist, but have not been applied, nor fine-tuned to such new technology so far. Within this contribution, we enhance these existing instruments with the special needs required for measuring technology acceptance of Augmented Reality and Wearable Technologies and we validate the new instrument with participants from three pilot areas in industry, namely aviation, medicine, and space. Findings of such baseline indicate that respondents in these pilot areas generally enjoy and look forward to using these technologies, for being intuitive and easy to learn to use. The respondents currently do not receive much support, but like working with them without feeling addicted. The technologies are still seen as forerunner tools, with some fear of problems of integration with existing systems or vendor-lock. Privacy and security aspects surprisingly seem not to matter, possibly overshadowed by expected productivity increase, increase in precision, and better feedback on task completion. More participants have experience with AR than not, but only few on a regular basis.