"I simply watched where she was looking at"

Abstract

Mixed reality (MR) cooperation scenarios are more and more interesting for business and research as powerful wearable devices like head mounted displays (HMD) become commercially available. A lot of work focuses on remote MR cooperation settings like remote maintenance support and co-located scenarios in which participants cooperate over a longer period time. Despite this, MR also has great potential for real-time co-located cooperation support with the need of short-term decisions and interactions. However, little is known on how this support can be provided. To bridge this gap, we conducted an experiment using a MR visual search task performed by dyads. Based on related work, visual search was chosen to represent typical challenges of short-term cooperative MR tasks. The aim of the experiment was to explore how the participants coordinate their searches and how this influences their performance in a task. We found that participants mainly used embodied and verbal cues to coordinate their searches (rather than virtual cues provided by the HMD) and that less communication worked significantly better, which is in (partial) contrast to existing findings. We discuss potential reasons for and impacts of these findings.