Having spent what seems like a life time of answer questions over the phone, going back to Rockwell as an Apps engineer in 1980, then for my own customers since. I know there are many ways to improve remote assistance. However, from my experience with tough cases and cross culture situations, like starting the company in the Philippines, I know there are moments where just a hand full of face to face grunts and hand waving could have saved hours of otherwise misdirected effort.
It's funny you mention that. I've worked quite a bit with the director of research in their services department at the university. When i was talking to him of the idea of a robot base he got very excited. One of the things we'd discussed was the idea of a problem with the "Germany" plant (just happened to pick a country for sake of discussion), how can I go out on the line and look to see what the problem is? Well if I can log onto one of the remotes there, I can drive right out to the production line and look around for myself. I can go to the worker on the line and ask him questions. I can look at gauges and see if I think parameters are okay or not.
We also talked about pointers, but we were thinking arms, where you could actually point like you would if you were face to face. The laser pointer is even a better idea. I'd probably make it independent from the head though. Another neat feature was if the remote worker had a laser of his own, perhaps modulated, where he could point, and the optics locally would cause the head camera to move there. So he could highlight features he wanted you to look at, and then ask questions as well.
I've done that before, where I wrote on a piece of paper and held it up to the camera where my face was. Problem was I only had a pencil. When I blackend in the lines making them about 1/4" thick it worked fine. So think "Marksalot" tip when doing that.
Some systems have what they call white boards, where one or both ends can draw on a screen and the other can see it. I've had no success to date using a white board, but tried several times.
That's the commercial market that Cisco and Polycom are seeing and going after.
Have you tried IM lately? Now called Windows Live Messanger. It does much better today than just a year ago. Also Skype, a free VoIP solution. Call anywhere in the world. They brought out a video version. It was too preliminary then, but it's been about a year since I tried it again, it may have improved.
I first tried to teach the class from my ranch. The latency got up to 4
- 5 seconds. That was simply annoying. Very choppy and disconcerting. Unnatural. However, from the office (T1) it worked well. About a 1/4 to
1/2 second. Very tolerable.
Yes, I had to open ports on my firewalls as well. Surprizingly, I didn't for Messenger. It was much better about translating past them.
Did you know you can buy PVX software that runs on your PC (>1.4GHz ones) for about $120? (Tigerdirect.com for instance). A copy on each end would get you close to what you are describing without the mobility, of course. It would be laptop to laptop then with no pan and tilt.
In their more expensive purpose built units, Polycom has pan and tilt cameras built in. My experience with PVX to Polycom 3000 in the class was that the camera would only move about one in four times of pushing the controls button, and rather later than I'd hope. I am told two Polycom units do very well with remote pan and tilt, and they have remotes to tell the camera where to go on the far end. Let's your distant operator point the camera where he wants to, to show something.
Contact me if you care to Joe. We can try a video IM message session and you can see how useful it is. I also just loaded the updated PVX software, but haven't used it yet. We'll probably be using it later today (this evening) in my next classroom appearance.
-- Randy M. Dumse