With a little help from a holographic friend

Abstract

Remote mixed reality (MR) collaboration systems allow for multimodal, real-time support from remote experts. We present our open toolkit that provides a flexible end-to-end solution for building such systems using off-the-shelf hardware. From related work, three core design aspects have been identified: 1) the independence of the viewpoint that the visitor (the remote expert) can take in relation to position and viewpoint of the visitee, 2) the immersiveness of the presentation technology for visitor and visitee, and 3) the extent to which the visitor's body is represented in the visitee's environment. This paper describes the implementation of our system, which includes these aspects. In a study aimed at validating whether we implemented these core aspects to good effect, conducted with a collaborative puzzle application built with our toolkit, we examine how variations of these aspects contribute to usability, performance and social presence related metrics.