Head-Mounted Augmented Reality (AR) systems permit the real-time embedding of visual and textual information in the view field of cooperating users. We start with two head-mounted AR-systems equipped with an active memory infrastructure (AMI), capable of automatically structuring multi-modal memory in an intelligent way. This allows us to investigate alignment along the following lines:

• We search for evidence for alignment by data analysis of memory traces from AR-based-cooperation experiments. In result, the alignment recorder, a novel monitoring tool for observing the dynamics of alignment processes will be implemented, and – as future perspective – this may allow improving active memory structures to operate in better analogy to the alignment model of Pickering & Garrod.
  
  
• AR-based communication permits to actively trigger misalignment, for instance by augmenting tangible objects with contradictory visualizations for the users in cooperative sorting games. This (in conjunction with the simultaneous memory recording) allows us to induce misalignment and to study alignment processes in an otherwise impossible way.
  
  
• AMI-supported AR-systems offer to develop supportive alignment channels by making their memory traces mutually transparent by visual or auditory augmentations. We investigate the effects of such shared information on cooperation and their utility to accelerate or modify alignment processes.

In summary, AR-based communication is hereby developed as analysis tool, as experimental technique and as a novel supportive channel for alignment in human cooperation.