Collaborative Work Enabled by Immersive Environments

Digital transformation facilitates new methods for remote collaboration while shaping a new understanding of working together. In this chapter, we consider global collaboration in the context of digital transformation, discuss the role of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) within the transformation process, present an overview of the state of CVEs and go into more detail on significant challenges in CVEs by providing recent approaches from research

Using Collaborative Immersive Environments and Building Information Modeling Technology for Holistic Planning of Production Lines

Large and complex building projects need many different experts from different engineering disciplines for different matters. But these experts each use their own IT tools that produce a lot of heterogeneous data. This leads to a strong fragmentation of competencies, what causes problems for interdisciplinary collaboration, because the data might be inconsistent, redundant or there are no interfaces to combine the data. These problems in collaboration increase the risk of planning mistakes that might significantly impair the overall project success. So only one database should be used for all engineering tasks to improve the transdisciplinary collaboration. The Building Information Modelling (BIM) working methodology enables the digital collaboration of virtual production planning and architecture tasks for developing a building. By means of lean optimization in combination with early integration of future-oriented production facilities, process-relevant production data can be included in the planning phase before construction begins. This article presents a real time immersive 3D virtualization system using the digital twin of complex buildings with a modern production line as the single source of truth and creates a consistent integrated data model, that enables transdisciplinary collaboration of all involved engineering disciplines. In this way, a continuous comparison can be made between the real construction project and its digital twin in an interactive, intuitive and collaborative manner. The same model is also used by production planners to optimize the material flow and in general the value chain of a production line through a holistic planning, which brings many benefits for all stakeholders

Asynchronous Manual Work in Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration

International audienceResearch in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) is becoming more and more significant with increasing accessibility of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology, additionally reinforced by the increasing demand for remote collaboration groupware. While the research is focusing on methods for synchronous remote collaboration, asynchronous remote collaboration remains a niche. Nevertheless, future CVEs should support both paradigms of collaborative work, since asynchronous collaboration has as well its benefits, for instance a more flexible time-coordination. In this paper we present a concept of recording and later playback of highly interactive collaborative tasks in Mixed Reality (MR). Furthermore, we apply the concept in an assembly training scenario from the manufacturing industry and test it during pilot user experiments. The pilot study compared two modalities, the first one with a manufacturing manual, and another using our concept and featuring a ghost avatar. First results revealed no significant differences between both modalities in terms of time completion, hand movements, cognitive workload and usability. Some differences were not expected, however, these results and the feedback brought by the participants provide insights to further develop our concept

Comparing Avatar and Face-to-Face Collaboration in VR Education: Concept and Preliminary Insights

Virtual education is gaining prominence, providing opportunities for dynamic interactive content, such as Digital Twins, and novel collaboration modalities, including options for remote classrooms. In this work, we present a concept that leverages Digital Twins for interactive group work in engineering education through the use of Virtual Reality technology. We propose an experimental investigation to compare diverse collaboration alternatives facilitated by Virtual Reality, specifically face-to-face and avatar-based interaction. Preliminary findings are discussed, along with their implications for the design and implementation of future experiments in this emerging field

Immersive Hand Instructions in AR – Insights for Asynchronous Remote Collaboration on Spatio-Temporal Manual Tasks

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) have recently become more prominent in academic research and industrial applications. Physical tasks often rely on sharing spatial information between the collaborators, which are difficult to communicate verbally or by 2D media. Immersive technologies, like Mixed Reality (MR), can sup-port more natural and intuitive interaction between the collaborators, share important non-verbal cues, like gaze and deictic gestures, and improve the performance time of remote guidance tasks. In this work we present HoloHands - a concept for immersive hand instructions which can be used for asynchronous remote collaboration on spatial tasks. A Hololens device is utilized to capture hand motions and interactions with virtual representations of physical objects to create a guidance by simply demonstrating the instruction steps. The recordings can be consumed by other collaborators at a later time to perform the physical task which we validated in a preliminary user experiment. Since it allows the creation and retention of digital information for a later consumption, it provides the possibility to revisit previous work sessions at any time and thus opens new possi-bilities to collaborate asynchronously on spatio-temporal tasks. In this work we share valuable insights from our experience with the HoloHands concept and the utilization of the Hololens headset