Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly positioned as a tool for knowledge work, providing beneficial affordances such as a virtually limitless display space that integrates digital information with the user's physical surroundings. However, for AR to supplant traditional screen-based devices in knowledge work, it must support prolonged usage across diverse contexts. Until now, few studies have explored the effects, opportunities, and challenges of working in AR outside a controlled laboratory setting and for an extended duration. This gap in research limits our understanding of how users may adapt its affordances to their daily workflows and what barriers hinder its adoption. In this article, we present findings from a longitudinal diary study examining how participants incorporated an AR laptop - Sightful's Spacetop EA - into their daily work routines. 14 participants used the device for 40-minute daily sessions over two weeks, collectively completing 103 hours of AR-based work. Through survey responses, workspace photographs, and post-study interviews, we analyzed usage patterns, workspace configurations, and evolving user perceptions. Our findings reveal key factors influencing participants' usage of AR, including task demands, environmental constraints, social dynamics, and ergonomic considerations. We highlight how participants leveraged and configured AR's virtual display space, along with emergent hybrid workflows that involved physical screens and tasks. Based on our results, we discuss both overlaps with current literature and new considerations and challenges for the future design of AR systems for pervasive and productive use.

Remote collaborative work has become pervasive in many settings, ranging from engineering to medical professions. Users are im-mersed 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 the design of new devices such as cus-tomized prosthetics, vehicles or buildings. Discussing such shared 3D content face-to-face, however, has a variety of challenges such as ambiguities, occlusions, and different viewpoints that all decrease mutual awareness, which in turn leads 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. To measure what two users perceive in common when using pointing gestures in a shared 3D space, we introduce a novel metric called pointing agreement. 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.

The recent pandemic, war, and oil crises have caused many to reconsider their need to travel for education, training, and meetings. Providing assistance and training remotely has thus gained importance for many applications, from industrial maintenance to surgical telemonitoring. Current solutions such as video conferencing platforms lack essential communication cues such as spatial referencing, which negatively impacts both time completion and task performance. Mixed Reality (MR) offers opportunities to improve remote assistance and training, as it opens the way to increased spatial clarity and large interaction space. We contribute a survey of remote assistance and training in MR environments through a systematic literature review to provide a deeper understanding of current approaches, benefits and challenges. We analyze 62 articles and contextualize our findings along a taxonomy based on degree of collaboration, perspective sharing, MR space symmetry, time, input and output modality, visual display, and application domain. We identify the main gaps and opportunities in this research area, such as exploring collaboration scenarios beyond one-expert-to-one-trainee, enabling users to move across the reality-virtuality spectrum during a task, or exploring advanced interaction techniques that resort to hand or eye tracking. Our survey informs and helps researchers in different domains, including maintenance, medicine, engineering, or education, build and evaluate novel MR approaches to remote training and assistance. All supplemental materials are available at https://augmented-perception.org/publications/2023-training-survey.html.