Distant Assist Cursor (DAC): Designing an Augmented Reality System to Facilitate Remote Collaboration for Novice Users

Many existing Augmented Reality (AR) systems facilitate remote collaboration by allowing users to share activity cues such as cursors. However, a lot of these systems require expensive hardware or non-negligible calibration phases which may deter novice users from using them. To overcome these barriers, we propose the Distant Assist Cursor (DAC): an AR remote collaboration system for sharing a virtual cursor. DAC relies on a camera and a projector sharing the same optical center. This design allows to use cheap hardware and a straightforward calibration phase. In this paper, we present the design of this system made to help novice users. We then evaluate DAC by assessing its benefits and usability for remote collaboration tasks.