Industrial and systems engineering assistant professor earns NSF CAREER Award for human-centered augmented reality research
Published: Jun 15, 2026 1:00 PM
By Dustin Duncan
Missie Smith, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study how augmented reality interfaces affect human decision-making, perception and performance.
Augmented reality is often described in terms of what the technology can do — the graphics it can display, the information it can layer over the physical world and the experiences it can create.
Missie Smith, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering, is asking what may be the more important question: What is the technology doing to the person using it?
Smith has received a five-year, $599,999 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study how augmented reality interfaces affect the way people process information, make decisions and interact with the world around them.
As emerging technologies become more advanced, engineers must ensure those systems are designed around human needs, limitations and behavior. It’s a challenge Smith has spent much of her academic career trying to answer.
“We’re developing lots of new technologies,” Smith said. “Where we fall short often is understanding how it’s changing who we are as people, how we interact with the world and how we understand the world.”
Augmented reality, or AR, adds digital information to a person’s view of the real world. That could mean a notification in smart glasses, driving information displayed on a windshield, patient data visible to a medical professional or digital instructions layered into a manufacturing environment.
However, AR shouldn’t be treated as one broad category. The same information can affect a user differently depending on how it is presented.
That distinction is at the center of Smith’s project, which will develop and test the “Visual Integration Framework.” The framework is designed to help researchers and engineers understand how different AR interface formats influence attention, workload, perception and performance.
A navigation system might tell a person to turn left by placing an arrow in the user’s field of vision, highlighting the road where the turn should happen or displaying the route as a digital path within the physical environment.
“Those are three completely different ways of conveying the same information, all using AR,” Smith said. “From a user's perspective, there’s different trade-offs that you have to make.”
Those trade-offs matter as AR moves closer to everyday use in cars, headsets, phones, health care, emergency response and industrial settings. A more advanced graphic may not always be more helpful than a simple cue presented at the right time.
Smith’s work challenges the idea that the best AR system is necessarily the most immersive or visually impressive. Instead, her project aims to help designers make more informed decisions about whether to use AR — and what kind of AR to use.
“What I really care about is how the system handles situations it wasn’t designed for?” Smith said. “Can we compensate for it, or are we worse off than if we never used it?”
Through the CAREER project, Smith will compare different types of AR while keeping the task and information the same.
Participants will complete spatial navigation and assembly tasks using different AR cues, allowing the research team to study not only whether participants complete the tasks successfully but also how each interface affects confusion, stress, workload and performance.
The CAREER award gives Smith the opportunity to pursue those questions through a long-term research and education agenda, while also involving undergraduate and graduate students in human factors research, experimental design and emerging technology.
A major outreach component, AR for Everyone, will bring mobile and wearable AR systems into public libraries in Alabama and Mississippi. The effort is designed to introduce children, older adults and rural residents to augmented reality while also helping Smith’s research team understand how the framework applies beyond a controlled laboratory setting.
Her goal is not simply to help build more advanced AR systems. It is to develop systems that are safer, more useful and more closely aligned with the people expected to use them.
“This is the problem I’ve been chasing for a decade,” Smith said. “I just wasn’t in the right position to actually do the work until now.”
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