Evaluation of Pointing Ray Techniques for Distant Object Referencing in Model-Free Outdoor Collaborative Augmented Reality

Pointing Rays in AR 4. (a). Observer’s view of the single ray marked by pointer aiming at Target 2, Parallel Bars are parallel to the single ray; the white sphere denotes the closest point on the ray to the observer (highlighted by a blue square); (b). Observer’s view of the Double Ray technique placed by the pointer aiming at Target 4; the two rays are visually bracketing the target lamppost. Images are captured from Microsoft HoloLens 2 and carry intrinsic offsets.

Referencing objects of interest is a common requirement in many collaborative tasks. Nonetheless, accurate object referencing at a distance can be challenging due to the reduced visibility of the objects or the collaborator and limited communication medium. Augmented Reality (AR) may help address the issues by providing virtual pointing rays to the target of common interest. However, such pointing ray techniques can face critical limitations in large outdoor spaces, especially when the environment model is unavailable. In this work, we evaluated two pointing ray techniques for distant object referencing in model-free AR from the literature: the Double Ray technique enhancing visual matching between rays and targets, and the Parallel Bars technique providing artificial orientation cues. Our experiment in outdoor AR involving participants as pointers and observers partially replicated results from a previous study that only evaluated observers in simulated AR. We found that while the effectiveness of the Double Ray technique is reduced with the additional workload for the pointer and human pointing errors, it is still beneficial for distant object referencing.

Journal Articles

Yuan Li; Ibrahim A Tahmid; Feiyu Lu; Doug A Bowman

Evaluation of Pointing Ray Techniques for Distant Object Referencing in Model-Free Outdoor Collaborative Augmented Reality Journal Article

In: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 11, pp. 3896–3906, 2022.

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