LightCollabo: Distant Collaboration Support System for Manufacturers

This paper introduces our LightCollabo system which is a distant collaboration tool designed for manufacturers. For distant collaboration between factory workers and members of a product design team, it is important to support interactive discussion over actual objects. LightCollabo enables remotely located people to share a view of actual objects and to annotate on the objects by using a camera and a projector whose optic axes and view angles are precisely aligned. Light-Collabo has been experimentally deployed in several locations in China and Japan and proven to be effective. Initial results of our use case study are also described.