The Stretchable Arms for Collaborative Remote Guiding

Abstract

The help of a remote expert to guide an agent in performing a physical task can be advantageous in many ways: saving time and money by avoiding travel, and thus increasing the rate of intervention. In many situations, the remote expert wishes to guide the agent by first placing him in the correct location to achieve the task. However, as the agent is not a robot, the expert can not use a location controller to place the agent. Instead, interaction techniques must enable the expert to achieve this task before physical manipulation guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel interaction technique for remote guiding based on arm gestures. First, the remote expert (using a VR setup) virtually collocates himself with the agent (using an AR setup), then controls virtual arms collocated with both users' shoulders. Second, if the expert starts to move forward to grasp a virtual object, the virtual arms start to stretch in order to keep the shoulders' collocation on the agent's side. This metaphor allows the agent to understand the direction of the expert's motion easily while preserving the naturalness of the interaction and avoiding the use of a frustum to represent the expert's head location.