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

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.