A proposal of body movement-based interaction towards remote collaboration for concurrent engineering

Abstract

The goal of concurrent engineering is to achieve the reduction of cost and time-to-market as well as to improve the quality of products, where collaboration of participants among different locations is critical. Various types of communication tools are available. However, the participants do not have the same feeling as a face-to-face meeting in remote communication. This study focuses on the issues of tele-presence and virtual immersion in remote communication, and proposes an idea of body movement-based interaction. The first approach is a hand gesture-based interaction called ATPI, which covers the natural control and mimicry of movement towards a distant object. The second approach is a head movement-based interaction called ARM-COMS, which covers the physical challenge as well as the mimicry of head movement using a physical object. Based on the preliminary experiments for these two approaches, feasibility of the idea of body movement-based interaction will be discussed in this paper.