Remote collaborative work has become pervasive in many settings, from engineering to medical professions. Users are immersed in virtual environments and communicate through life-sized avatars that enable face-to-face collaboration. Within this context, users often collaboratively view and interact with virtual 3D models, for example, to assist in designing new devices such as customized prosthetics, vehicles, or buildings. However, discussing shared 3D content face-to-face has various challenges, such as ambiguities, occlusions, and different viewpoints that all decrease mutual awareness, leading to decreased task performance and increased errors. To address this challenge, we introduce MAGIC, a novel approach for understanding pointing gestures in a face-to-face shared 3D space, improving mutual understanding and awareness. Our approach distorts the remote user\'s gestures to correctly reflect them in the local user\'s reference space when face-to-face. We introduce a novel metric called pointing agreement to measure what two users perceive in common when using pointing gestures in a shared 3D space. Results from a user study suggest that MAGIC significantly improves pointing agreement in face-to-face collaboration settings, improving co-presence and awareness of interactions performed in the shared space. We believe that MAGIC improves remote collaboration by enabling simpler communication mechanisms and better mutual awareness.

翻译：远程协作已在从工程到医疗等众多领域变得无处不在。用户沉浸在虚拟环境中，通过真人尺寸的虚拟形象进行面对面协作。在此背景下，用户常共同查看并操作虚拟3D模型，例如协助设计定制义肢、车辆或建筑等新设备。然而，面对面讨论共享3D内容存在诸多挑战，如歧义、遮挡及不同视点，这些均会削弱相互感知，导致任务效率下降与错误率增加。为解决此问题，我们提出MAGIC——一种在面对面共享3D空间中理解指向手势的新方法，旨在提升相互理解与感知。该方法通过扭曲远程用户的手势，使其在本地用户的参考空间中正确呈现。我们引入一项新指标“指向一致性”（pointing agreement），用于量化两用户在共享3D空间中通过指向手势所感知的共同内容。用户研究结果表明，MAGIC在面对面协作场景中显著提升了指向一致性，增强了共享空间中的共在感与交互感知。我们相信，MAGIC通过简化沟通机制与增强相互感知，改善了远程协作。