Designing Together at a Distance: Mediating Industrial Remote Co-Design Through eXtended Reality Technologies

Abstract

Remote collaboration is increasingly central to today’s globalized economy, yet distributed teams still face challenges related to limited shared context, reduced expressiveness, and lower engagement. These issues are especially critical in industrial co-design, where complex physical artifacts, spatial reasoning, and multidisciplinary coordination play a key role. Conventional remote tools often fail to adequately convey geometry, scale, and functional relationships, resulting in misunderstandings and extended iteration cycles. To address these challenges, we explore eXtended Reality (XR) to support remote co-design in industrial settings. XR enables collaborators to establish common ground through spatially anchored digital content, such as three-dimensional models, annotations, measurements, and multimodal communication, bridging gaps between physical and remote collaboration. We propose a pervasive Augmented Reality (AR) tool for distributed co-design that allows users to manipulate digital models, generate exploded views, inspect components, perform precise measurements to assess tool applicability, and create three-dimensional annotations. Collaboration can occur synchronously or asynchronously, enabling iterative contributions and refinement of design decisions until consensus is achieved. We evaluated the approach through a user study with 30 participants in a real-world industrial scenario involving the central mold of a heavy hydraulic press. Results show that the tool establishes a shared discussion space, promotes attentional engagement, enhances understanding of complex design information, and supports articulation of ideas, while maintaining low mental and physical workload. Overall, the findings highlight the potential of immersive technologies to enhance industrial co-design beyond physical boundaries and reinforce the value of a human-centered design approach aligned with existing work practices.

Keywords: Augmented Reality, Remote Collaboration, Co-Design, Maintenance, Industry 5.0

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007284