Vishnu: virtual immersive support for HelpiNg users an interaction paradigm for collaborative remote guiding in mixed reality

Increasing networking performances as well as the emergence of Mixed Reality (MR) technologies make possible providing advanced interfaces to improve remote collaboration. In this paper, we present our novel interaction paradigm called Vishnu that aims to ease collaborative remote guiding. We focus on collaborative remote maintenance as an illustrative use case. It relies on an expert immersed in Virtual Reality (VR) in the remote workspace of a local agent helped through an Augmented Reality (AR) interface. The main idea of the Vishnu paradigm is to provide the local agent with two additional virtual arms controlled by the remote expert who can use them as interactive guidance tools. Many challenges come with this: collocation, inverse kinematics (IK), the perception of the remote collaborator and gestures coordination. Vishnu aims to enhance the maintenance procedure thanks to a remote expert who can show to the local agent the exact gestures and actions to perform. Our pilot user study shows that it may decrease the cognitive load compared to a usual approach based on the mapping of 2D and de-localized informations, and it could be used by agents in order to perform specific procedures without needing to have an available local expert.