In particular, joint attention on an object of mutual interest is a common requirement in many collaborative tasks ( Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986 Dare, 1995). The advantages of co-located, in-person communication include nonverbal communication in such forms as gestures, gaze awareness, and eye contact ( Zahn, 1991 Olson and Olson, 2000).

Our work also identified mixed results of the effect of spatial relationships between users.Ī unique advantage of face-to-face communication is visibility, defined as “being able to see each other” ( Clark et al., 1991). We found that participants’ performance in AR was reduced compared to a real-world condition, but also that they developed new strategies to cope with the limitations of AR. In this paper, we present a study utilizing head-worn AR displays to examine the effects of incorrect occlusion cues on spatial target identification in a collaborative barehanded referencing task.

While such pointing gestures can be efficient and effective in real life, performance will be impacted if the target is in augmented reality (AR), where depth cues like occlusion may be missing if the pointer’s hand is not tracked and modeled in 3D. If the collaborators are co-located and the target position is in close range, it is almost instinctual for users to refer to the target location by pointing with their bare hands. In many collaborative tasks, the need for joint attention arises when one of the users wants to guide others to a specific location or target in space.

Center for Human-Computer Interaction, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, United States.

Yuan Li*, Donghan Hu, Boyuan Wang, Doug A.

Trials frontier data cubes