Assessing Visual Cues for Improving Awareness in Collaborative Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology that offers new and compelling design opportunities for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). To foster collaboration and communication in AR-based CSCW, users should be able to understand how others interact with the shared environment. One of the most effective ways to support this awareness is to link user interactions to visual cues (VCs) that provide immediate cognitive feedback about the actions of other users (e.g., pointing, annotating, or manipulating objects). However, AR-based CSCW is in many ways still in its infancy in terms of visual language, and further research is needed, especially to evaluate the effectiveness of different VCs in improving user awareness in collaborative, co-located AR scenarios. To this end, this paper presents an evaluation of different VCs based on previous literature. Experiments were conducted with different scenarios covering the main purposes for which VCs are used and in which users had to perform tasks with increasing complexity. Results show that volunteers positively evaluated the VCs offered, as they effectively supported user awareness and provided contextual and spatial information to all participants.