The primary goal of this thesis is to use Mixed Reality (MR) technology to enhance remote collaboration in a room-scale workspace. One of the fundamental requirements for remote collaborative system design is to help the remote expert to correctly understand the local worker’s surrounding environment and support efficient remote communication, especially while working in a room-scale environment. To address this issue, I discuss the advantages and limitations of enabling a remote team to share a 3D view of the same workspace at the same time from different physical locations. I develop several prototype designs, and evaluate these designs with users on common collaborative tasks.

In this thesis, I present empirical results from five user studies on how Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) combined with 3D capture hardware, co-presence techniques, and efficient guidance cues can enhance the task performance and user experience of room-scale remote collaboration. To compare different interface design approaches, I developed a testbed that combines a low-resolution static 3D point cloud capture of the environment surrounding the local worker with a high-resolution real- time view of small focused details. User studies with the system found that the use of a 3D virtual representation can effectively improve the remote expert’s spatial aware- ness of the local work environment. I also found that a high-resolution local view is always helpful for guiding, no matter if it is 2D or 3D, especially for complex operations. Furthermore, mutual awareness is an important factor in supporting natural communication.

This dissertation contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of MR remote collaboration systems’ interface design in various guiding scenarios. As a result, my research explored some basic design principles of an MR remote collaboration system while working in a room-scale workspace and pointed out future research directions.