Comparing the Effect of Audio and Visual Notifications on Workspace Awareness Using Head-Mounted Displays for Remote Collaboration in Augmented Reality

In many fields of activity, working in teams is necessary for completing tasks in a proper manner and often requires visual context-related information to be exchanged between team members. In such a collaborative environment, awareness of other people’s activity is an important feature of shared-workspace collaboration. We have developed an augmented reality framework for virtual colocation that supports visual communication between two people who are in different physical locations. We address these people as the remote user, who uses a laptop and the local user, who wears a head-mounted display with an RGB camera. The remote user can assist the local user in solving a spatial problem, by providing instructions in form of virtual objects in the view of the local user. For annotating the shared workspace, we use the state-of-the-art algorithm for localization and mapping without markers that provides “anchors” in the 3D space for placing virtual content. In this paper, we report on a user study that explores on how automatic audio and visual notifications about the remote user’s activities affect the local user’s workspace awareness. We used an existing game to research virtual colocation, addressing a spatial challenge on increasing levels of task complexity. The results of the user study show that participants clearly preferred visual notifications over audio or no notifications, no matter the level of the difficulty of the task.