Influence of Display Transparency on Background Awareness and Task Performance

It has been argued that transparent displays are beneficial for certain tasks by allowing users to simultaneously see on-screen content as well as the environment behind the display. However, it is yet unclear how much in background awareness users gain and if performance suffers for tasks performed on the transparent display, since users are no longer shielded from distractions. Therefore, we investigate the influence of display transparency on task performance and background awareness in a dual-task scenario. We conducted an experiment comparing transparent displays with conventional displays in different horizontal and vertical configurations. Participants performed an attention-demanding primary task on the display while simultaneously observing the background for target stimuli. Our results show that transparent and horizontal displays increase the ability of participants to observe the background while keeping primary task performance constant.