Incorporating Drone Into Mixed Reality for Enhanced Remote Collaboration: A User Study on Inspection Task.

Supporting natural communication cues is critical for people to work together remotely and face-to-face. In this paper we present a Mixed Reality (MR) remote collaboration system that enables a local worker to share a live 3D panorama of his/her surroundings with a remote expert. The remote expert can also share task instructions back to the local worker using visual cues in addition to verbal communication. We conducted a user study to investigate how sharing augmented gaze and gesture cues from the remote expert to the local worker could affect the overall collaboration performance and user experience. We found that by combing gaze and gesture cues, our remote collaboration system could provide a significantly stronger sense of co-presence for both the local and remote users than using the gaze cue alone. The combined cues were also rated significantly higher than the gaze in terms of ease of conveying spatial actions.

This paper investigates how different collaboration styles and view independence affect remote collaboration. Our remote collaboration system shares a live video of a local user’s real-world task space with a remote user. The remote user can have an independent view or a dependent view of a shared real-world object manipulation task and can draw virtual annotations onto the real-world objects as a visual communication cue. With the system, we investigated two different collaboration styles; (1) remote expert collaboration where a remote user has the solution and gives instructions to a local partner and (2) mutual collaboration where neither user has a solution but both remote and local users share ideas and discuss ways to solve the real-world task. In the user study, the remote expert collaboration showed a number of benefits over the mutual collaboration. With the remote expert collaboration, participants had better communication from the remote user to the local user, more aligned focus between participants, and the remote participants’ feeling of enjoyment and togetherness. However, the benefits were not always apparent at the local participants’ end, especially with measures of enjoyment and togetherness. The independent view also had several benefits over the dependent view, such as allowing remote participants to freely navigate around the workspace while having a wider fully zoomed-out view. The benefits of the independent view were more prominent in the mutual collaboration than in the remote expert collaboration, especially in enabling the remote participants to see the workspace.

Remote collaboration systems allow users at different sites to perform joint tasks, which are required by many real-life applications. For example, environmental pollution is a complex problem requiring many kinds of expertise to fully understand, as pollutants disperse not only locally but also regionally or even globally. This paper presents a remote collaborative visualization system through providing co-presence, information sharing, and collaborative analysis functions based on mixed reality techniques. We start with developing an immersive visualization approach for analyzing multi-attribute and geo-spatial data with intuitive multi-model interactions, simulating co-located collaboration effects. We then go beyond by designing a set of information sharing and collaborative analysis functions to support different users to share and analyze their sensemaking processes collaboratively. We provide example results and usage scenario to demonstrate that our system enables users to perform a variety of immersive and collaborative analytics tasks effectively. Through two small user studies focusing on evaluating our design of information sharing and system usability, the evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of comprehensive sharing among user, data, physical, and interaction spaces for improving remote collaborative analysis experience.

Remote collaboration has been studied for more than two decades and now there is the possibilities for new types of collaboration with the recent advances in immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR). However, despite the increasing research interest in remote collaboration study with VR/AR/MR technologies, there is still a lack of academic venues specifically focusing on VR/AR/MR remote collaboration research. This special issue provides high-quality papers on the topic of remote collaboration research and increases visibility of this timely interesting and important research area. We particularly focus on three research aspects in remote collaboration: (1) use of multimodal communication cues, (2) awareness of the task space, and (3) human factors understanding. In this editorial, we first describe five essential factors for remote collaboration: task, local user, remote user, communication, and tool/interface, and then summarize a brief history of the research areas. We also cover the feature papers accepted in this issue, which introduce novel multimodal interfaces for remote collaboration and the effects on task performance and perceptual factors. Finally, we discuss some potential future research directions while concluding the editorial.

We present ConnectBoard, a new system for remote collaboration where users experience natural interaction with one another, seemingly separated only by a vertical, transparent sheet of glass. It overcomes two key shortcomings of conventional video communication systems: the inability to seamlessly capture natural user interactions, like using hands to point and gesture at parts of shared documents, and the inability of users to look into the camera lens without taking their eyes off the display. We solve these problems by placing the camera behind the screen, where the remote user is virtually located. The camera sees through the display to capture images of the user. As a result, our setup captures natural, frontal views of users as they point and gesture at shared media displayed on the screen between them. Users also never have to take their eyes off their screens to look into the camera lens. Our novel optical solution based on wavelength multiplexing can be easily built with off-the-shelf components and does not require custom electronics for projector-camera synchronization.

This paper investigates the effect of avatar appearance on Social Presence and users' perception in an Augmented Reality (AR) telep-resence system. Despite the development of various commercial 3D telepresence systems, there has been little evaluation and discussions about the appearance of the collaborator's avatars. We conducted two user studies comparing the effect of avatar appearances with three levels of body part visibility (head & hands, upper body, and whole body) and two different character styles (realistic and cartoon-like) on Social Presence while performing two different remote collaboration tasks. We found that a realistic whole body avatar was perceived as being the best for remote collaboration, but an upper body or cartoon style could be considered as a substitute depending on the collaboration context. We discuss these results and suggest guidelines for designing future avatar-mediated AR remote collaboration systems.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies can be used to address people with auditory disabilities by integrating them in an interpersonal communication via textual visualization of speech. Especially in avatar-based Mixed Reality (MR) remote collaboration systems, speech is an important additional modality and allows natural human interaction. Therefore, we propose an easy to integrate ASR and textual visualization extension for an avatar-based MR remote collaboration system that visualizes speech via spatial floating speech bubbles. In a small pilot study, we achieved word accuracy of our extension of 97% by measuring the widely used word error rate.

We present a Mixed Reality system for remote collaboration using Virtual Reality (VR) headsets with external depth cameras attached. By wirelessly sharing a 3D point-cloud data of a local workers' workspace with a remote helper, and sharing the remote helper's hand gestures back to the local worker, the remote helper is able to assist the worker to perform manual tasks.Displaying the point-cloud video in a conventional way, such as a static front view in VR headsets, does not provide helpers with sufficient understanding of the spatial relationships between their hands and the remote surroundings. In contrast, we propose a Mixed Reality (MR) system that shares with the remote helper, not only 3D captured environment data but also real-time orientation info of the worker's viewpoint. We conducted a pilot study to evaluate the usability of the system, and we found that extra synchronized orientation data can make collaborators feel more connected spatially and mentally.

This study assesses the integration of mixed reality (MR) technologies in medical first responder (MFR) training, focusing on identifying key factors influencing behavioral intention to use MR systems and practical implications for technology acceptance and enhanced realism through haptic feedback. Through a user-centered design approach, involving co-creation workshops, iterative development, and evaluations in pilot and field trials across six countries, this study evaluated technology acceptance, presence, user experience, and workload among MFRs. Both quantitative measures and qualitative feedback were collected to analyze the determinants of technology acceptance and user engagement. The MED1stMR training system, developed as a result, demonstrates that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social presence are significant predictors of behavioral intention to use MR training systems among MFRs. High technology acceptance and positive user experience were reported, with specific emphasis on the educational value of haptic feedback in skill training. Trainer feedback highlighted the importance of real-time performance metrics and openness to AI-driven training assistance for enhancing training outcomes. The study underscores the critical role of realistic patient interaction and the importance of aligning training challenges with users’ skills to create engaging MR training environments for MFRs. Identifying factors influencing behavioral intention offers valuable insights for the development of MR training systems, suggesting a focus on social presence and interactive capabilities to improve realism and educational value. The findings advocate for the integration of adaptive training features and further exploration of AI support in scenario optimization and performance enhancement.

A tension exists between designers' comfort with physical artifacts and the need for effective remote collaboration: physical objects live in one place. Previous research and technologies to support remote collaboration have focused on shared electronic media. Current technologies force distributed teams to choose between the physical tools they prefer and the electronic communication mechanisms available. We present Distributed Designers' Outpost, a remote collaboration system based on The Designers' Outpost, a collaborative web site design tool that employs physical Post-it notes as interaction primitives. We extended the system for synchronous remote collaboration and introduced two awareness mechanisms: transient ink input for gestures and a blue shadow of the remote collaborator for presence. We informally evaluated this system with six professional designers. Designers were excited by the prospect of physical remote collaboration but found some coordination challenges in the interaction with shared artifacts.

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONS As extended reality (XR) technologies continue to evolve, their use in remote collaboration and workplaces with physical limitations offers opportunities to improve ergonomics and efficiency. In this study, we explored how virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) systems impact users’ sense of presence, perceived workload, object manipulation, and physiological responses in remote collaboration settings with movement constraints. We found that VR-based collaboration enhanced the sense of presence and reduced the need for physical movement compared to MR. Specifically, features such as a thumbstick button enabled teleportation in VR to help minimize physical strain. In contrast, MR systems led to higher objective and subjective measures of physical demands, suggesting greater strain and potential fatigue from ongoing physical interactions. Our findings highlight the importance of designing XR systems that balance productivity with worker well-being, particularly in environments that require physical adaptability.

Shared Mixed Reality experiences allow two co-located users to collaborate on both physical and digital tasks with familiar social protocols. However, extending the same to remote collaboration is limited by cumbersome setups for aligning distinct physical environments and the lack of access to remote physical artifacts. We present SurfShare, a general-purpose symmetric remote collaboration system with mixed-reality head-mounted displays (HMDs). Our system shares a spatially consistent physical-virtual workspace between two remote users, anchored on a physical plane in each environment (e.g., a desk or wall). The video feed of each user's physical surface is overlaid virtually on the other side, creating a shared view of the physical space. We integrate the physical and virtual workspace through virtual replication. Users can transmute physical objects to the virtual space as virtual replicas. Our system is lightweight, implemented using only the capabilities of the headset, without requiring any modifications to the environment (e.g. cameras or motion tracking hardware). We discuss the design, implementation, and interaction capabilities of our prototype, and demonstrate the utility of SurfShare through four example applications. In a user experiment with a comprehensive prototyping task, we found that SurfShare provides a physical-virtual workspace that supports low-fi prototyping with flexible proxemics and fluid collaboration dynamics.

Tangible physical systems are more intuitive than Intangible virtual Systems. Mixed reality systems are considered as an alternative to virtual systems, bringing advantages of tangible systems into an interaction. However, past research has mainly focussed on technical aspects of incorporating pervasive-ness and immersive-ness in the virtual systems. This paper reports on an empirical study of intuitive Interaction in a Mixed Reality game system for children and the design aspects that could facilitate intuitive Interaction in such systems. A related samples Friedman’s test showed that the Mixed Reality game system demonstrated more intuitive interactions than non‐intuitive Interactions. A linear regression analysis further established that the variation in intuitive Interaction in the Mixed Reality system could be statistically significantly explained primarily by physical affordances offered by the Mixed Reality system and to a lesser extent by the perceived affordances in the system. Design guidelines to develop intuitive Mixed Reality systems are discussed. These guidelines should allow designers to exploit the wonders of advances in technology and at the same time allow users to directly interact with the physical real world. This will allow users to access maximal physical affordances, which are primary contributors to intuitive interaction in Tangible and Mixed Reality systems. Keywords: Intuitive Interaction; Mixed Reality Systems; Tangibles; Child Computer Interaction

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.

In today’s digital era, the realms of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) collectively referred to as extended reality (XR) are reshaping human–computer interactions. XR technologies are poised to overcome geographical barriers, offering innovative solutions for enhancing emotional and social engagement in telecommunications and remote collaboration. This paper delves into the integration of (AI)-powered 3D talking heads within XR-based telecommunication systems. These avatars replicate human expressions, gestures, and speech, effectively minimizing physical constraints in remote communication. The contributions of this research encompass an extensive examination of audio-driven 3D head generation methods and the establishment of comprehensive evaluation criteria for 3D talking head algorithms within Shared Virtual Environments (SVEs). As XR technology evolves, AI-driven 3D talking heads promise to revolutionize remote collaboration and communication.