The project develops the use of telepresence for maintenance, installation and repair of mechanical (or electromechanical) equipment. It is particularly dedicated to the training of complex maintenance/installation scenarios for remote users, such as small and medium sized enterprises (SME) which cannot afford on-site complex training equipment. The resulting technology should enable users to train themselves to deal with maintenance tasks by connecting to a 'Virtual Showroom' where they can learn maintenance procedures through computer-augmented video-based telepresence. Techniques used will be high-speed networks, video-based telepresence and Augmented Reality.
User requirements have been collected from industrial partners and other potential users interested in the exploitation of results. Possible scenarios have been defined (installation, training, maintenance and marketing). A first system design has been derived from user requirements and application scenarios. Special focus has been attached to SME relevance and to maintain SME-applicability within project's design activities. Tools (distributed virtual reality, VR, Multimedia tools) and techniques (Teleoperation, Augmented Reality and Speech interaction techniques) have been investigated and the DOVRE system developed by has been chosen as the distributed VR platform to support the solution. Regarding networking aspects, networked experiments of the DOVRE framework over local area network/wide area network (LAN/WAN), 2b + d integrated services digital network (ISDN) and public switched telephone network ( ) were conducting and an overview on the intelligent peripheral (IP) over asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) techniques was examined in order to decide which is the most suitable for the system. The contribution to standards has also been studied and reported. Various standards have been studied.