AnchorNote: Exploring Speech-Driven Spatial Externalization for Co-Located Collaboration in Augmented Reality
This addresses the problem of enhancing collaborative brainstorming and organization in AR for co-located teams, though it is incremental in exploring speech-driven spatial externalization.
The paper tackled the problem of externalizing ideas in co-located augmented reality collaboration by introducing AnchorNote, a system that captures spoken ideas as spatially anchored sticky notes using transcription and LLM summarization. The result showed that it reduced writing effort but introduced new coordination costs and shifted how participants formulated and organized ideas, as evaluated in a study with 20 participants.
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.