ARPuzzle: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Collaborative Augmented Reality

Collaborative Augmented Reality (CAR) offers disruptive ways for people to collaborate. However, this emerging technology must improve its acceptance, efficiency, and usability to scale up and, for example, support augmented operations executed by technicians. This paper presents our CAR system and its experimentation during a cooperative puzzle-solving task. Our system provides collaborators with a shared virtual space allowing verbal and non-verbal interpersonal communications, and intuitive interactions with shared virtual replicas of real objects. Our system also integrates avatars embodied by remote users. We conducted a dual-user study comparing colocated and remote solving of a puzzle virtual replica with its real solving. We evaluated task performance, collaboration, mutual awareness, spatial presence, and copresence, usability, and preference. We found that, if real is preferred and more efficient than our CAR system, CAR is reaching favorable usability levels. We also found that remote augmented reality including full-body avatars offers similar results to colocated augmented reality. This preliminary work paves the way for future research aiming to support and enhance the design and making of Collaborative Augmented Reality systems dedicated to augmented operations.