The Effect of View Independence in a Collaborative AR System

In this paper we describe a system for remote collaboration using Augmented Reality (AR) that supports view independence. The system was designed to allow a remote user to assist a local user in an object placement task. The remote helper can navigate the local user’s scene independently from the local user by using a three-dimensional reconstruction of the environment. The remote user can also place virtual annotations in the scene that the local user views through a head mounted display. The system tracks the position of key physical objects and the local user’s head pose, displaying both to the remote user. A key advantage of this system compared to other collaborative AR interfaces is that it allows the remote expert to have an independent view into the shared task space. A user study was performed using this system with the users completing a simple mostly two-dimensional object placement task. It was designed to test how the amount of remote view independence affected collaboration. Four conditions were used with varying degrees of view independence. It was found that increased view independence led to faster task completion time, more confidence from users, and a decrease in the amount of time spent communicating verbally during the task. However, varying the view independence did not significantly change the accuracy of the placement of objects. The implications of the results are discussed along with directions for future research.