  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.
