Remote Assistance | Doris Aschenbrenner
Exploration of different Augmented Reality Visualizations for Enhancing Situation Awareness for Remote Factory Planning Assistance
Travel costs and time consumption play an important role in industrial factory planning; thus many companies intend to use remote assistance and virtual co-location of the workers via software instead. Shared visual context can help in remote assistance scenarios and mixed reality approaches promise to transport the local situation to the external expert in order to give him or her the experience of ‘actually being there’ (remote presence).
A key question for this issue is: How could the local situation be visualized to help the remote expert? Therefore, this paper investigates three different visualization methods for the remote perspective in a collaborative factory planning task. Two local operators collaborate in a shared augmented reality setting and are supervised by a third, virtually co-located person with the help of his/her interface. In a user study with 30 participants, we found significant indications that the use of a ‘god-mode’ perspective for the remote expert provides the best situation awareness, even compared to a ‘real-size’ version setting or a ‘first person’ perspective through the HMD (head-mounted display) camera of one of the local operators.
