Help! I Need a Remote Guide in My Mixed Reality Collaborative Environment

Abstract

The help of a remote expert in performing a maintenance task can be useful in many situations, and can save time as well as money. In this context, augmented reality (AR) technologies can improve remote guidance thanks to the direct overlay of 3D information onto the real world. Furthermore, virtual reality (VR) enables a remote expert to virtually share the place in which the physical maintenance is being carried out. In a traditional local collaboration, collaborators are face-to-face and are observing the same artifact, while being able to communicate verbally and use body language, such as gaze direction or facial expression. These interpersonal communication cues are usually limited in remote collaborative maintenance scenarios, in which the agent uses an AR setup while the remote expert uses VR. Providing users with adapted interaction and awareness features to compensate for the lack of essential communication signals is therefore a real challenge for remote MR collaboration. However, this context offers new opportunities for augmenting collaborative abilities, such as sharing an identical point of view, which is not possible in real life. Based on the current task of the maintenance procedure, such as navigation to the correct location or physical manipulation, the remote expert may choose to freely control his/her own viewpoint of the distant workspace, or instead may need to share the viewpoint of the agent in order to better understand the current situation. In this work, we first focus on the navigation task, which is essential to complete the diagnostic phase and to begin the maintenance task in the correct location. We then present a novel interaction paradigm, implemented in an early prototype, in which the guide can show the operator the manipulation gestures required to achieve a physical task that is necessary to perform the maintenance procedure. These concepts are evaluated, allowing us to provide guidelines for future systems targeting efficient remote collaboration in MR environments.

AR Presentation of Team Members’ Performance and Inner Status to Their Leader: A Comparative Study

“…For example, capturing a team member's active and passive actions and behaviors would provide other team members and team leaders with a much broader range of information when confronted with decision-making [15]. To improve the awareness of collaboration, several techniques have been explored: representing hands, arms and full body gestures [20][21][22][23]; sharing the view frustum as a visible cone or pyramid, head or eye gazes as seeable rays [1,6,[11][12][13]22,[24][25][26]; giving people a pointer, with a shared visual representation, to clarify what people want to designate [21,24,27,28]; or providing the ability to sketch on surfaces or mid-air [21,28].…”

Towards Outdoor Collaborative Mixed Reality: Lessons Learnt from a Prototype System

“…Outdoor CMR systems enable new forms of games [4,17,35], tourism [7,16], and navigation [22]. Other applications, which have been thoroughly investigated in indoor settings, may find wider or new applications in outdoor spaces such as visualisation and design [36,37], training and education [15,28,29], and remote assistance [11,14].…”

How Can One Share a User’s Activity during VR Synchronous Augmentative Cooperation?

“…While CVEs are becoming widespread, there is still a lack in the perception of other users' activity and emotional states [6]. The perception of collaborative activity is based on workspace awareness [7][8][9] (sum of knowledge, perception, and understanding of an environment) and empathic computing [10] (how technologies can be used to help increase empathy or create deeper shared understanding between users). Generally, these works intend to understand how people experience impact on their feelings and metabolism.…”