ARTV Ornamentations In Situ with Realistic Awareness Task: Raw Dataset from a Physical Subway Carriage Study

This dataset contains raw data from a within-subjects laboratory study (N=19) providing the first in situ evaluation of ARTV Ornamentation outside a wholly VR-simulated transit environment. This study deployed pass-through AR within a decommissioned subway carriage housed in a museum exhibit, introducing real physical spatial constraints, ambient activity, and natural bystander presence. A secondary stop-announcement awareness task was also introduced to approximate the attentional demands of self-managed passenger travel. The study used a six-condition within-subjects design. The four AR and simulated-AR conditions formed an embedded 2×2 comparison crossing environment type (pass-through AR in the physical carriage versus simulated AR-in-VR in a nearby private room) with ornamentation presence (baseline versus ARTV Ornamented), enabling direct comparison of physically situated and simulated AR findings. Two fully immersive VR reference conditions — a VR Cinema and a VR Videosphere (floating screen surrounded by a static 360° panoramic image matched to the biome of the clip) — were additionally included to contextualise ARTV within existing commercial XR media-viewing approaches. Across all conditions, participants wore a Meta Quest 3 headset and Sony ZX310 over-ear headphones and viewed three approximately two-minute video clips per condition, drawn from Game of Thrones, the Star Wars original trilogy, and David Attenborough nature documentaries, each restricted to a single biome. During each condition, participants simultaneously performed a secondary stop-announcement awareness task, monitoring scrolling station signage (physical tablet in the carriage for AR conditions; virtual display in the simulated conditions; audio-only in the VR conditions) and indicating when a target stop was reached. Awareness task performance was recorded as a binary pass/fail outcome. Bystander counts — the total number of members of the public present in or entering the carriage during each trial — were recorded by the experimenter. After each condition, participants completed the short-form User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ-S; 8 items) and the short-form User Engagement Scale (UES-SF; 12 items), along with two custom awareness items on a 5-point Likert scale capturing awareness of surrounding passengers and of the augmentations. Following all six conditions, participants completed a condition preference ranking, a usage-intention item for each condition, and a semi-structured exit interview. Due to the dual-location setup, conditions were grouped by location into two blocks (physical carriage and simulated room), with half of participants beginning in each block and condition order within blocks counterbalanced across participants. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 55 (M=28.95, SD=9.02; 11 male, 8 women). Most reported limited prior experience with XR head-mounted displays. Nine participants wore glasses. Participants were compensated with a £10 Amazon voucher. The dataset comprises anonymised Qualtrics survey responses (CSV), anonymised and interview transcripts (TXT; originally transcribed using WhisperX), R analysis scripts, and experimenter-recorded bystander count data. The study was approved by the University of Glasgow Ethics Committee. This dataset supports the findings reported in Chapter 6 of the associated PhD thesis: Balancing Media Immersion and Reality Awareness forPassengers through Augmented Reality TV Ornamentations, University of Glasgow.