AnchorNote: Exploring Speech-Driven Spatial Externalization for Co-Located Collaboration in Augmented Reality

TL;DR

AnchorNote is an AR system that captures spoken ideas as spatially anchored sticky notes, influencing collaboration dynamics and offering insights into speech-driven spatial externalization in co-located AR environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AR tool that uses speech and LLM summarization to externalize ideas spatially, and studies its impact on collaborative cognition and coordination.

Findings

Reduced writing effort in collaboration.

Introduced new coordination costs.

Shifted how ideas are formulated and organized.

Abstract

Sticky notes remain a durable collaborative medium because they support rapid idea externalization, rearrangement, and coordination of group attention through spatial organization while being low-friction and lightweight. Recent AR systems suggest new ways to externalize ideas in shared physical space, including spatial annotations and digital workspaces. We introduce AnchorNote, a co-located AR system that lets collaborators intentionally capture spoken ideas as spatially anchored sticky notes via live transcription and LLM summarization. We evaluated AnchorNote in a two-phase iterative study with 20 participants completing a brainstorming and thematic grouping task to examine how speech-driven, spatially persistent capture shapes idea externalization in collaboration. We found that AnchorNote reduced writing effort but reshaped collaboration by introducing new coordination costs and shifting how participants formulated, timed, and organized ideas. We use AnchorNote as an exploratory probe to study how speech-driven, spatial externalization in AR restructures collaborative cognition and coordination, and to derive design implications for future co-located AR collaboration tools.