Anticipation Without Acceleration: Benefits of Shared Gaze in Collocated Augmented Reality Collaboration

Knowing what collaborators attend to is essential. Previous studies demonstrated that shared gaze enhances coordination and social connectedness in remote settings. In collocated settings, gaze can be both naturally observable and technologically augmented. AR enables gaze cues to be rendered explicitly in the environment. To investigate if and how such cues are beneficial in collocated AR collaboration, we examined both qualitative and quantitative effects across three task types (puzzle, negotiation, search) and two spatial setups (plane, room), focusing on task completion time and the collaborative experience. In our user study with 24 dyads (n=48), we varied gaze visibility and measured task performance, user preference, social connectedness, and shared attention. Our results show that sharing gaze in collocated collaborative AR can increase shared attention, is perceived as helpful, and improves the user experience, similar to remote collaboration, but has a limited impact on the actual task completion time across the chosen tasks.