Effect of Visual Cues on Pointing Tasks in Co-located Augmented Reality Collaboration

TL;DR

This study investigates how different visual cues, specifically Pointing Line and Moving Track, affect performance and user experience in co-located AR collaboration tasks involving multiple users and objects.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of two head-based visual cues in AR, offering insights into their impact on task efficiency and social perception during collaborative pointing tasks.

Findings

Pointing Line improves task performance and usability.

Moving Track enhances social presence and user preference.

Design implications for AR pointing tasks are proposed.

Abstract

Visual cues are essential in computer-mediated communication. It is especially important when communication happens in a collaboration scenario that requires focusing several users' attention on aspecific object among other similar ones. This paper explores the effect of visual cues on pointing tasks in co-located Augmented Reality (AR) collaboration. A user study (N = 32, 16 pairs) was conducted to compare two types of visual cues: Pointing Line (PL)and Moving Track (MT). Both are head-based visual techniques.Through a series of collaborative pointing tasks on objects with different states (static and dynamic) and density levels (low, mediumand high), the results showed that PL was better on task performance and usability, but MT was rated higher on social presenceand user preference. Based on our results, some design implicationsare provided for pointing tasks in co-located AR collaboration.