Mixing Realities: Leveraging Augmented Reality to Support Remote Collaboration for Educational Scenarios, Share Digital Objects Across Distance, and Demonstrate the Physical Nature of Visualizations

Augmented Reality (AR) is a medium that gives people the ability to engage with digital information in ways that deviate from more traditional HCI methods (e.g. WIMP user interfaces (Christensson, 2014)). Previous work has shown that AR has useful implications for collaboration, and with remote work experiences and teleconferencing becoming increasingly prevalent and important to people as many are working together over distance (remotely) in higher frequencies, understanding how AR might impact remote work is of particular interest. In this work, I review literature around methods for remote collaboration and using AR (and Virtual Reality (VR)) for collaboration, investigate ways that AR can support efforts to work together across distance, and study how invoking AR may create a sense of joint focus and engagement beyond what traditional remote collaboration tools afford. I explore the design process and development of an AR teleconferencing tool, SAROSvis, that allows participants to interact with one another around digital assets in AR and pass digital objects through the screen to one another while physically remote. I investigate the use cases of this tool by comparing across curated conditions and evaluating versions of this tool in user studies; I also describe the evaluation methods and user testing results of this system. This work aims to develop a research-based resource for those looking to utilize AR tools for collaboration around 3D entities or environments, with an understanding of the requirements, desires, and limitations of users and scenarios. I propose that there are meaningful ways that people can remotely collaborate in educational spaces using AR to pass (digital) objects to one another through the screen and using AR as a layer on top of the features that existing teleconferencing tools provide can make for more spatially appropriate, collaborative, engaging communication sessions while working remotely