Evaluating Collaborative Cues for Remote Affinity Diagramming Tasks in Augmented Reality

This thesis documents the design and implementation of an augmented reality (AR) application that could be extended to support group brainstorming tasks remotely. Additionally, it chronicles our investigation into the helpfulness of traditional collaborative cues in this novel application of augmented reality. We implemented IdeaSpace, an interactive application that emulates an affinity diagramming environment on an AR headset. In our application, users can organize and manipulate virtual sticky notes around a central virtual board. We performed a user study, with each session requiring users to perform an affinity diagramming clustering task with and without common collaborative cues. Our results indicate that the presence or absence of cues has little effect on this task, or that other factors played a larger role than cue condition, such as learning effects. Our results also show that our application's usability could be improved. We conclude this document with a discussion of our results and the design implications that may arise from them.