Integrating Remote Participants into Co-Located Collaborative Tasks through VR and AR

Scenarios of co-located and remote collaboration require solutions to establish a common ground between team-members, allowing to discuss solutions for a given problem. Technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR) have been facing a growing interest due to their capacity to share the real-world environment and enhance it with layers of digital information, allowing to share ideas and define strategies to address existing problems. This work describes a framework for addressing multi-user co-located collaboration, as well as considering the need of having remote elements participating in the collaborative process. As use case, an assembly serious game with distinct levels of complexity was contemplated. Given the inclusion of multiple members, methods for interaction, synchronization and ownership were designed and developed. To verify the correct functioning of the functionalities developed, two user studies occurred at distinct moments of the development process.