ABSTRACT
Remote communication is essential for efficient collaboration among people at different locations. We present ConeSpeech, a virtual reality (VR) based multi-user remote communication technique, which enables users to selectively speak to target listeners without distracting bystanders. With ConeSpeech, the user looks at the target listener and only in a cone-shaped area in the direction can the listeners hear the speech. This manner alleviates the disturbance to and avoids overhearing from surrounding irrelevant people. Three featured functions are supported, directional speech delivery, size-adjustable delivery range, and multiple delivery areas, to facilitate speaking to more than one listener and to listeners spatially mixed up with bystanders. We conducted a user study to determine the modality to control the cone-shaped delivery area. Then we implemented the technique and evaluated its performance in three typical multi-user communication tasks by comparing it to two baseline methods. Results show that ConeSpeech balanced the convenience and flexibility of voice communication.
ABSTRACT
The recent pandemic, war, and oil crises have caused many to reconsider their need to travel for education, training, and meetings. Providing assistance and training remotely has thus gained importance for many applications, from industrial maintenance to surgical telemonitoring. Current solutions such as video conferencing platforms lack essential communication cues such as spatial referencing, which negatively impacts both time completion and task performance. Mixed Reality (MR) offers opportunities to improve remote assistance and training, as it opens the way to increased spatial clarity and large interaction space. We contribute a survey of remote assistance and training in MR environments through a systematic literature review to provide a deeper understanding of current approaches, benefits and challenges. We analyze 62 articles and contextualize our findings along a taxonomy based on degree of collaboration, perspective sharing, MR space symmetry, time, input and output modality, visual display, and application domain. We identify the main gaps and opportunities in this research area, such as exploring collaboration scenarios beyond one-expert-to-one-trainee, enabling users to move across the reality-virtuality spectrum during a task, or exploring advanced interaction techniques that resort to hand or eye tracking. Our survey informs and helps researchers in different domains, including maintenance, medicine, engineering, or education, build and evaluate novel MR approaches to remote training and assistance. All supplemental materials are available at https://augmented-perception.org/publications/2023-training-survey.html.
