Duplicated Reality for Co-located Augmented Reality Collaboration.

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Computer Graphics
• Collaborative Systems

Background:

• Augmented Reality (AR) enables powerful communication for multi-disciplinary co-assisting tasks.
• Collaborative AR often faces challenges with conflicting user intentions in shared physical spaces.
• Physical co-location can be a constraint in remote collaborative scenarios.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate the Duplicated Reality concept for remote AR collaboration.
• To enable remote annotation of a 3D region of interest (ROI) while maintaining co-location.
• To compare Duplicated Reality with in-situ augmentation in terms of collaboration, effort, awareness, usability, and task quality.

Main Methods:

• Real-time reconstruction of a 3D ROI into a digital copy.
• In-situ visualization of the digital copy via an AR user interface.
• User study comparing Duplicated Reality with in-situ augmentation.

Main Results:

• Duplicated Reality yielded objective and subjective results comparable to in-situ augmentation.
• A slight decrease in the consulting user's awareness of co-located users was observed with Duplicated Reality.
• The duplication of the working area into a consulting area offers novel interaction possibilities.

Conclusions:

• Duplicated Reality is a viable method for enhancing remote collaboration in AR.
• The system effectively supports remote annotation and co-located interaction.
• Further research into new interaction paradigms for Duplicated Reality in AR collaboration is warranted.