Usability Heuristics for Collaborative Augmented Reality Remote Systems

Recent advances in computer device design led to new research breakthroughs in the area of augmented reality (AR). A wide range of new applications emerged for use in daily tasks. Due to the AR achieved maturity and robustness, more research efforts are devoted to open challenges including application usability. As such, this article presents and adopts a number of usability heuristics for use in the particular case of collaborative distributed augmented reality systems. In order to validate the proposed heuristics, a case study for an industrial maintenance system is considered. The resulting testbed is seen as a low cost AR application scenario due to its use of off-the-shelf user mobile devices. The main contributions of the present research are: the formal process to conceive a heuristics' list, the proposed heuristics' list for collaborative remote AR systems, and a first refinement of the heuristics through an experiment with a functional prototype based on a low cost collaborative remote AR model.