  Augmented Reality (AR) allows us to represent information in the user's own
environment and, therefore, convey a visceral feeling of its true physical
scale. Journalists increasingly leverage this opportunity through immersive
infographics, an extension of conventional infographics reliant on familiar
references to convey volumes, heights, weights, and sizes. Our goal is to
measure the contribution of immersive mobile AR concrete scales infographics to
the user's understanding of the information scale. We focus on infographics
powered by tablet-based mobile AR, given its current much more widespread use
for news consumption compared to headset-based AR. We designed and implemented
a study apparatus containing three alternative representation methods (textual
analogies, image infographic, and AR infographic) for three different pieces of
news with different characteristics and scales. In a controlled user study, we
asked 26 participants to represent the expected volume of the information in
the real world with the help of an AR mobile application. We also compared
their subjective feelings when interacting with the different representations.
While both image and AR infographics led to significantly better comprehension
than textual analogies alone across different kinds of news, AR infographics
led, on average, to a 31.8% smaller volume estimation error than static ones.
Our findings indicate that mobile AR concrete scales infographics can
contribute to news reporting by increasing readers' abilities to comprehend
volume information.
