A comprehensive survey on AR-enabled local collaboration

With the rapid development of augmented reality (AR) technology and devices, it is widely used in education, design, industry, game, medicine and other fields. It brings new development opportunities for computer-supported cooperative work. In recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies on AR collaboration. Many professional researchers have also summarized and commented on these local and remote applications. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive review specifically on AR-enabled local collaboration (AR-LoCol). Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of research between 2012 and 2022 in this domain. We surveyed 133 papers on AR-LoCol in Web of Science, 75% of which were published between 2018 and 2022. Next, we provide an in-depth review of papers in seven areas, including time (synchronous and asynchronous), device (hand-held display, desktop, spatial AR, head-mounted display), participants (double and multiple), place (standing, indoor and outdoor), content (virtual objects, annotations, awareness cues and multi-perspective views), and area (education, industry, medicine, architecture, exhibition, game, exterior design, visualization, interaction, basic tools). We discuss the characteristics and specific work in each category, especially the advantages and disadvantages of different devices and the necessity for shared contents. Following this, we summarize the current state of development of AR-LoCol and discuss possible future research directions. This work will be useful for current and future researchers interested in AR-LoCol systems.