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.

Locomotion in virtual environments is currently a difficult and unnatural task to perform. Normally, researchers tend to devise ground-floor-based metaphors, to constrain the degrees of freedom (DoFs) during motion. These restrictions enable interactions that accurately emulate human gait to provide high interaction fidelity. However, flying allows users to reach specific locations in a virtual scene more expeditiously. Our experience suggests that high-interaction fidelity techniques may also improve the flying experience, although it is not innate to humans, since it requires simultaneously controlling additional DoFs. We contribute with the Magic Carpet, an approach to flying that combines a floor-proxy with a full-body representation, to avoid imbalance and cybersickness issues. This design space allows to address direction indication and speed control as two separate phases of travel, thereby enabling techniques with higher interaction fidelity. To validate our design space, we developed two complementary studies, one for each of the travel phases. In this paper, we present the results of both studies within the Magic Carpet design space. To this end, we applied both objective and subjective measurements to determine the best set of techniques inside our design space. Our results show that this approach enables high-interaction fidelity techniques while improving user experience.

When users wear a virtual reality (VR) headset, they lose access to their smartphone and accompanying apps. Past work has proposed smartphones as enhanced VR controllers, but little work has explored using existing smartphone apps and performing traditional smartphone interactions while in VR. In this paper, we consider three potential spatial anchorings for rendering smartphones in VR: On top of a tracked physical smartphone which the user holds (Phone-locked), on top of the user’s empty hand, as if holding a virtual smartphone (Hand-locked), or in a static position in front of the user (World-locked). We conducted a comparative study of target acquisition, swiping, and scrolling tasks across these anchorings using direct Touch or above-the-surface Pinch. Our findings indicate that physically holding a smartphone with Touch improves accuracy and speed for all tasks, and Pinch performed better with virtual smartphones. These findings provide a valuable foundation to enable smartphones in VR.

Live and pre-recorded video tutorials are an effective means for teaching physical skills such as cooking or prototyping electronics. A dedicated cameraperson following an instructor’s activities can improve production quality. However, instructors who do not have access to a cameraperson’s help often have to work within the constraints of static cameras. We present Stargazer, a novel approach for assisting with tutorial content creation with a camera robot that autonomously tracks regions of interest based on instructor actions to capture dynamic shots. Instructors can adjust the camera behaviors of Stargazer with subtle cues, including gestures and speech, allowing them to fluidly integrate camera control commands into instructional activities. Our user study with six instructors, each teaching a distinct skill, showed that participants could create dynamic tutorial videos with a diverse range of subjects, camera framing, and camera angle combinations using Stargazer.

Extended Reality (XR) offers the potential to transform the passenger experience by allowing users to inhabit varied virtual spaces for entertainment, work or social interaction, whilst escaping the constrained transit environment. XR allows remote collaborators to feel like they are together and enables them to perform complex 3D tasks. However, the social and physical constraints of the passenger space pose unique challenges to productive and socially acceptable collaboration. Using a collaborative VR puzzle task, we examined the effects of five different f-formations of collaborator placement and orientation in an interactive workspace on social presence, task workload, and implications for social acceptability. Our quantitative and qualitative results showed that face-to-face formations were preferred for tasks with a high need for verbal communication but may lead to social collisions, such as inadvertently staring at a neighbouring passenger, or physical intrusions, such as gesturing in another passenger’s personal space. More restrictive f-formations, however, were preferred for passenger use as they caused fewer intrusions on other passengers’ visual and physical space.