Distributed Asymmetric Virtual Reality in Industrial Context: Enhancing the Collaboration of Geographically Dispersed Teams in the Pipeline of Maintenance Method Development and Technical Documentation Creation

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is a critical emerging technology in industrial contexts, as it facilitates collaboration and supports the product development lifecycle. However, its broad adoption is constrained by complex and high-cost integration. The use of VR among devices with various immersion and control levels may solve this obstacle, and increase the scalability of VR technologies. This article presents a case study on applying asymmetry between the COVE-VR platform and Microsoft Teams to enable distributed collaboration of multinational departments and enhance the maintenance method and documentation creation processes. Overall, five remote collaborative sessions were held with 20 experts from four countries. Our findings suggest that asymmetry between head-mounted display and Teams users enhances the quality of communication among geographically dispersed teams and their spatial understanding, which positively influences knowledge transfer and efficiency of industrial processes. Based on qualitative evaluation of the asymmetric VR setup, we further suggest a list of guidelines on how to enhance the collaboration efficiency for low-cost distributed asymmetric VR from three perspectives: organization, collaboration and technology.

Evaluating the Benefits of Collaborative VR Review for Maintenance Documentation and Risk Assessment

“…In this section, we detail an exploratory user study, which is the third iteration round of a project that investigates the application of VR for technical documentation creation purposes. The previous iterations were focused on the early phases of documentation creation [46][47][48], while in this work, we demonstrate how VR can be used for collaborative technical documentation reviews and risk assessments. The focus of this study is not on the development of a VR platform but evaluating the usefulness and benefits of VR for the case study.…”

“…The VR platform used in the user study, COVE-VR, was designed based on the input of subject matter experts and evaluated in collaboration between industrial and academic researchers [46] in several iterations and scenarios [46][47][48]. The following two virtual environments (Lab and Showroom) were deployed to facilitate a wide scope of industrial tasks: (1) a small-sized Lab replicates the realistic context of an elevator shaft based on a 3D CAD model and (2) a Showroom is a larger space to facilitate collaboration of multiple multidisciplinary teams and in-depth investigation of 3D CAD models that would not be possible to perform in a smaller space.…”

“…In addition, previously tested [46][47][48] TextBox, Camera and Measure tools can be used as supportive tools during the review. With the TextBox tool, a user can input text via speech recognition (English or Finnish) or a virtual keyboard.…”

“…Accordingly, our study demonstrates that the greatest advantage of virtual reality for the maintenance documentation review and risk assessment processes is its positive effect on the collaboration of the team working together towards a common goal. Instead of people working independently and alone at their desktops or joining conference calls, VR offers them a collaboration platform where they have, despite of their physical location, a sense of being together in the same room [21,22,47,52]. Not only does VR enhance the current collaboration process by offering virtual access to equipment that is not available [4], it also promotes inclusiveness, as additional team members from other countries can easily join documentation review and risk assessment sessions from their own locations.…”

Improving the efficiency of virtual-reality-based ergonomics assessments with digital human models in multi-agent collaborative virtual environments

“…While this approach is functional, it limits and misses many key benefits that XR can introduce into a design process. While a more integrated XR solution is needed to access these benefits, it is also important to consider that not everyone will benefit from using XR technologies in a collaborative design process (Burova, Mäkelä, et al, 2022). As a result, we anticipate that future collaborative design processes will involve a mixture of technologies resulting in various asymmetries between collaborators.…”