The Effects of Incorrect Occlusion Cues on the Understanding of Barehanded Referencing in Collaborative Augmented Reality

Abstract

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Our work also identified mixed results of the effect of spatial relationships between users.

ARCritique: Supporting Remote Design Critique of Physical Artifacts through Collaborative Augmented Reality

“…BeThere, a proof-of-concept mobile collaborative system, allows remote users to use spatial input to perform a variety of virtual interactions in a local user's physical environment [41], illustrating the potential of a mobile collaborative system with good spatial referencing support. More recently, Li et al [26] explored the effect of occlusion cues and spatial configurations on barehanded object referencing in collaborative AR. Their work found collaborative performance might be reduced due to insufficient support of barehanded referencing caused by incorrect occlusion cues.…”