Exploring Audio, Visual, and Tactile Cues for Synchronous Remote Assistance

Abstract

Today, remote collaboration techniques between field workers and remotely located experts mainly focus on traditional communication channels, such as voice- or video-conferencing. Those systems may not be suitable in every situation or the communication gets cumbersome if both parties do not share a common ground. In this paper, we explore three supporting communication channels based on audio, visual, and tactile cues. We built a prototypical application implementing those cues and evaluated them in a user study. Based on the user feedback, we report first insights for building remote assistance systems utilizing additional cues.