Analyzing the Potential of Remote Collaboration in Industrial Mixed and Virtual Reality Environments

Remote assistance tools in customer support allow for fast response times and reduced service expenses. Video and screen-based applications are widely used in various areas but lack spatial interactivity due to the limitation to a two-dimensional screen. Mixed reality-supported remote collaboration is frequently addressed in research as a way to extend the interaction space. The presented systems often require complicated device setups, calibration, or precomputation for reconstruction of the physical environment. This work investigates a novel approach for location-independent remote assistance and collaboration utilizing state-of-the-art mixed reality devices without any additional hardware modifications. In our approach a local user scans the environment using a HoloLens' standard depth camera. The data is transferred to a remote user equipped with a Virtual Reality headset, where the environment is reconstructed in real-time. The users can interact in the same shared environment. In a user study, the perceived workload was measured for both sides to examine the practical applicability of our approach. The results show that for local users the tasks set resulted in a low mental load, but also indicate that the coarse representation of the environment was mentally demanding for the remote users to work with. With our work we want to make remote collaboration easier and viable for a broader range of applications and facilitate interactions between globally distributed users.