Effect of Visual Cues on Pointing Tasks in Co-located Augmented Reality Collaboration
This work addresses the problem of effective visual communication for users in collaborative AR environments, though it is incremental in comparing existing cue types.
The study investigated the effect of visual cues on pointing tasks in co-located AR collaboration, finding that Pointing Line improved task performance and usability, while Moving Track enhanced social presence and user preference.
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.