MARAE

Global context and issue

Remote collaboration has never been easier. Telephone, e-mail, instant messages, or even videoconferencing are collaboration means offered to the greatest number. However, they do not offer a common collaborative space, making them less effective than physical co-presence interactions. The rise of remote collaborative work challenges us to offer more efficient collaboration technologies. Augmented Reality (AR) allows multiple users to share a virtual space while perceiving their real environment. We experimented in 2021 with the collaborative resolution of a virtual puzzle in AR.

This technology is a new medium for social interaction. It has the potential to replace the current means of collaboration. The GAFAs, aware of this potential, offer platforms such as Microsoft Mesh or Facebook Workrooms VR.

The activity of the Cyber-Physical Universe research domain focuses in particular on the collaborative work of augmented technicians. Typically, in the context of collaboration between an on-site technician and a remote expert in charge of guiding him, collaborative augmented reality stimulates the commitment of the remote user. Your role is to propose innovative solutions in remote collaborative augmented reality and to propose a vision of this field.

Scientific aims – results and challenges

This thesis addresses the scientific issue of the mutual representation of remote collaborative environments. Remote collaboration benefits from the perception of the environment of each participant. However, in the literature, participants generally perceive their avatars in a virtual collaborative space shared thanks to virtual reality. For example, such spaces can be virtual collaborative spaces, or allow an augmented technician to collaborate with a remote expert projected into the virtual twin of the technician’s environment. But the case of remote augmented collaborators sharing an augmented collaborative space is not dealt with in the literature. In particular, the mutual representation of remote collaborative augmented environments is a new issue. The expected benefit of this work is to improve the performance of tasks performed in remote collaborative augmented reality and the usability of these systems.

The doctoral student will first carry out a state of art on the scientific objectives of the subject. He will become familiar with the subject by discovering our collaborative augmented reality platform ARCollab. During a 2nd time, he will propose innovative solutions to the detected locks. He will prototype them as platform modules. The contributions will be evaluated through users experimentation. Several publications will mark the progress of the work in order to get it validated by the scientific community. The doctoral student will fill patents if appropriate.