CAN VISUALISATION IMPROVE REMOTE COLLABORATION?

Collaboration is recognised as essential to achieve efficient and safe operation of industrial processes. This paper presents a comparison test of a P&ID-based schematic representation, a 2D map and a 3D visualisation for remote one-to-one collaborative tasks. The results indicate that the participants had a higher completion rate of tasks based on the 2D and 3D interfaces, and they experienced fewer communication errors. The main conclusion is that the choice of visualisation technique for the interface should strongly depend on the specific task. 3D and 2D interfaces afford to use spatial references more and more intuitively whereas the schematic interface supports the use of topological references better than the others.