Real-time customer support in factories with interactive AR

In the future, technicians will no longer have to travel far to rectify a fault on a machine. In the CORTEX² project, technicians see themselves in the same situation as their customers and can interact with each other remotely.
 
Although traditional video conferencing is suitable for collaboration at the desk, it does not yet offer sufficient possibilities for other forms of collaboration. CORTEX² combines video telephony with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for the next generation of telecollaboration.
 
At the stand of the Rhineland-Palatinate Innovation Agency (Hall 2, Stand C36), researchers from DFKI's Augmented Vision research department will be demonstrating what such an AR session in the factory could look like:
 
A person standing in a factory is trying to solve a machine problem. They are wearing AR glasses. These are used to capture their surroundings and transmit them to an expert at another location. The advantage of this is that only a 3D model of the environment is transmitted, which is more resource-efficient than the more data-intensive transmission of a video. The expert, who is also connected to the CORTEX² system, sees what the worker sees, either via VR glasses or on a computer. They can then intervene directly in the customer's troubleshooting scenario by actively creating virtual objects, such as arrows, and superimposing them in the worker's field of vision. Later, virtual floating hands will also be added as elements. As with conventional video telephony, the customer's face will also be transmitted. However, this will not be a video, but a reconstruction of the face with reduced bandwidth using a compression algorithm.