Augmented Collaboration in Shared Space Design through AR 

UIST'18 Adjunct Abstract

Augmented collaboration in a shared house design scenario has been studied widely with various approaches. However, those studies did not consider human perception. Our goal is to lower the user’s perceptual load for augmented collaboration in shared space design scenarios. Applying attention theories, we implemented shared head gaze, shared selected object, and collaborative manipulation features in our system in two different versions with HoloLens. To investigate whether user perceptions of the two different versions differ, we conducted an experiment with 18 participants (9 pairs) and conducted a survey and semi-structured interviews. The results did not show significant differences between the two versions, but produced interesting insights. Based on the findings, we provide design guidelines for collaborative AR systems.

Background

There have been growing research interests in augmented collaboration. Researchers have developed various systems for designing a shared space. In augmented collaboration, providing enough feedback is crucial for certain information shared between users. This is because human perception can only process objects that attract a lot of attention. However, there have been few studies considering human perception in an augmented collaboration context. 

We adapted attention theories on visualizing head gaze and selected objects, then investigated whether a user’s perceptual load is lowered by 1) collaborator’s head gaze looming or 2) non-selected objects becoming more transparent. We also studied whether 3) adjusting manipulation speed based on the distance between HoloLens and object provides easier control of objects. With these criteria, we evaluated our system in a user study.