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From ethnographic study to mixed reality: a remote collaborative troubleshooting system

Published: 19 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we describe how we moved from ethnographic study to design and testing of a Mixed Reality (MR) system, supporting collaborative troubleshooting of office copiers and printers. A key CSCW topic is how remotely situated people can collaborate around physical objects which are not mutually shared, without introducing new interactional problems. Our approach, grounded in an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre, was to create a MR system centred on a shared 3D problem representation, rather than to use video or Augmented Reality (AR)-based systems. The key drivers for this choice were that given the devices are sensor equipped and networked, such a representation can create reciprocal viewpoints onto the current state of this particular machine without requiring additional hardware. Testing showed that troubleshooters and customers could mutually orient around the problem representation and found it a useful troubleshooting resource.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '11: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
March 2011
764 pages
ISBN:9781450305563
DOI:10.1145/1958824
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 March 2011

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Author Tags

  1. collaborative device troubleshooting
  2. ethnography
  3. mixed reality

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CSCW '11
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CSCW '11: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
March 19 - 23, 2011
Hangzhou, China

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  • (2023)Story Mosaic: Visualizing Elder Life Stories for Caregiver Empowerment (Preprint)JMIR Aging10.2196/50037Online publication date: 18-Jun-2023
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