Grant: Engage Grants Program

XMG Studio is investigating how mobile technology can be best leveraged for the large technical supportmarket. Mobile video conferencing systems are now extremely common, and allow people separated over largedistances to easily communicate wherever high-speed network connectivity is available. However, currentmobile video conferencing systems have not been designed or built to support the needs of collaborativesupport work. In collaborative support work, a worker who is in the field performing technical repair orservices (called the local worker) for customers, and is confronted with a situation in which they needinformation about how to proceed. In these situations, the local worker must contact a colleague who is inanother location (called the remote supporter). For example, a furnace repairman who is confronted with anunfamiliar model would need to contact a remote supporter to receive the information they need to repair theunfamiliar furnace. In situations such as these, a remote supporter could best provide help to a local worker bybeing able to see the specific scenario that is confronting the local worker. Further, the remote supporter couldbest direct the local worker by being able to point out key features in the local workers physical environment,and by easily sharing key reference material. In this project, we will leverage our expertise incomputer-supported collaborative work, mobile technology, and augmented reality to build a fully workingprototype system that demonstrates how communication and collaboration can best be supported in these typesof remote support scenarios. We will build the system using web technologies (HTML5, Javascript) so that thesystem is platform agnostic and can be fully tested in many different scenarios. We will evaluate theperformance of our system by simulating its use in a number of different of real work remote support scenarios.This project impacts a number of important Canadian sectors -- including natural resources oil/gas,telecommunications, etc.). Because of the broad application and need for remote support tools, this work willnot only benefit XMG Studio, but potentially the competitive advantage of many other Canadian businesses.