Fully Asymmetric Remote Collaboration System

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the requirements for fully asymmetric remote collaboration and present a prototype system. Unlike previously studied asymmetric remote collaboration systems, fully asymmetric remote collaboration handles the cases, where a user of one side is a complete novice having difficulty in explaining his/her problems and unfamiliar with a collaboration system, and thus the remote expert of the other side must locate the local user's problem and teach the local user by having full control of the remote collaboration system. These cases can frequently occur when we collaborate with elderly people. For a fully asymmetric remote collaboration system, there are some requirements which are a little bit different from those of an asymmetric one. We itemize them in the three phases of collaboration: identifying a problem, finding a solution, and showing the solution to a local user. We also design and implement a prototype of a fully asymmetric collaboration system to meet the requirements. Our system consists of a robot with cameras and a projector for a local user and an HMD (head mounted display) with a controller for a remote expert. We also design an efficient HMD-based interaction method for fully asymmetric remote collaboration with our system. We show the efficiency of our prototype system in a fully asymmetric remote collaboration situation by user evaluation.