Collaborative Augmented Reality : Designing for Co-located and Distributed Spatial Activities

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) can create the illusion of virtual objects being integrated into the viewer’s physical environment. Researchers have identified numerous application areas that can benefit from AR. Moreover, they have suggested AR displays as tools to support co-located and distributed collaboration. Usually, collaboration requires the collaborators to coordinate their joint actions through conversation. Today, an increasing number of AR-capable smartphones and tablets contributes to the dissemination of AR technology. Yet, research has not widely investigated the question of how ARs can be designed to support conversation and collaboration. With the goal of informing interaction designers, this thesis studies how the design of ARs can facilitate collaborative, spatial activities. It builds on the assumption that spatial activities require the collaborators to exchange spatial information through conversation, e. g., to guide each other’s attention to a task object in the AR environment. To specify the location of a specific task object, speakers often utilize visually outstanding objects—so-called landmarks—as reference objects. Collaborative ARs, however, do not necessarily provide as many landmarks as some spatial activities would require. Moreover, distributed ARs may only offer physical landmarks that exist in one of the collaborator’s environment exclusively. Such landmarks are, therefore, useless for spatial conversations with a remote AR-collaborator. This work makes two propositions to overcome this issue of missing referencing options during co-located and distributed, collaborative spatial activities. The first proposition consists in adding shared, virtual landmarks to the collaborators’ AR. The second proposition consists in embedding both the task objects and the virtual landmarks into a shared, virtual environment. Within three controlled lab studies, this thesis evaluates the two propositions and makes three contributions. First, it provides a better understanding of how the propositions shape synchronous, co-located, and distributed spatial referencing. Second, it provides a set of design guidelines on how to support collaborative activities in AR that involve spatial referencing. Third, it informs future research to support AR-based, collaborative spatial activities.