The combination of visual communication cues in mixed reality remote collaboration

Many researchers have studied various visual communication cues (e.g. pointer, sketch, and hand gesture) in Mixed Reality remote collaboration systems for real-world tasks. However, the effect of combining them has not been so well explored. We studied the effect of these cues in four combinations: hand only, hand + pointer, hand + sketch, and hand + pointer + sketch, within the two user studies when a dependent view and independent view are supported respectively. In the first user study with the dependent view, the results showed that the hand gesture cue was the main visual communication cue and adding sketch cue to the hand gesture cue helped participants complete the task faster. In the second study with the independent view, the results showed that the hand gesture had an issue of local worker understanding remote expert's hand gesture cue and the main visual communication cue was the pointer cue with fast completion time and high level of co-presence.