AWARESCUES: Awareness Cues Scaling with Group Size and Extended Reality Devices

The Covid-19 pandemic has strongly increased the relevance of remote collaboration such that online meetings are now well-established in many companies. However, the corresponding tools usually fail to share 3D content. Although Extended Reality (XR) technologies are known to support exactly such purposes, they are rarely applied in practical settings as existing solutions are designed for specific use cases or hardware and hence lack scalability. In this paper, we investigate the scalability of awareness cues such as head- and hand-rays that are typically suggested to support communication in XR meeting spaces. Based on seven heuristics we identify scalability limitations of existing awareness cues such as incorrect representations of user behavior and visual information overload. Addressing these issues, we present four collaboration support features named AWARESCUES which allow to individually activate awareness cues for nine different co-located and distributed collaboration styles involving head-mounted and handheld displays.