Environment Spatial Restitution for Remote Physical AR Collaboration

The emergence of spatial immersive technologies allows new ways to collaborate remotely. However, they still need to be studied and enhanced in order to improve their effectiveness and usability for collaborators. Remote Physical Collaborative Extended Reality (RPC-XR) consists in solving augmented physical tasks with the help of remote collaborators. This paper presents our RPC-AR system and a user study evaluating this system during a network hardware assembly task. Our system offers verbal and non-verbal interpersonal communication functionalities. Users embody avatars and interact with their remote collaborators thanks to hand, head and eye tracking, and voice. Our system also captures an environment spatially, in real-time and renders it in a shared virtual space. We designed it to be lightweight and to avoid instrumenting collaborative environments and preliminary steps. It performs capture, transmission and remote rendering of real environments in less than 250ms. We ran a cascading user study to compare our system with a commercial 2D video collaborative application. We measured mutual awareness, task load, usability and task performance. We present an adapted Uncanny Valley questionnaire to compare the perception of remote environments between systems. We found that our application resulted in better empathy between collaborators, a higher cognitive load and a lower level of usability, remaining acceptable, to the remote user. We did not observe any significant difference in performance. These results are encouraging, as participants' observations provide insights to further improve the performance and usability of RPC-AR.