Evaluation of a mobile AR tele-maintenance system

Despite increased bandwidth in world-wide networks there are still situations in which only limited bandwidth is available for tele-collaboration between a technician maintaining a machine and an expert at a remote location. In this case, tele-cooperation is usually supported by synchronous audio but only asynchronous video exchange. We present an alternative approach for such a collaborative maintenance task. By utilizing techniques and technologies from Augmented Reality (AR) applications our approach can provide a synchronous shared visual context for the collaborators without a direct video link. The effectiveness of our experimental system for a tele-maintenance task was evaluated in a usability study.