Interactive multimedia for engineering tele-operation

Online Engineering allows users to perform tele-operation over the Internet. It is used in collaboratories, distance learning curriculum, and remote maintenance processes. Tele-operation over the Internet is however restrained by the development time and cost of ad hoc solutions. These solutions a) are hardly reusable, b) present a low fidelity of the human computer interface, and c) barely enable pervasive accesses (standalone clients or Web forms). We present in this paper a novel approach for building tele-operation Human Computer Interfaces based on interactive multimedia. The end-user commands the remote device using interactive elements in the multimedia interface. The feedback information is seen as a combination of natural video content, produced by an IP camera capturing the instrument and synthetic graphics corresponding to elements of the device input interface (control panel). The proposed architecture fosters the reuses and gives a high level of interoperability between command terminals, since the interface can be displayed in any terminal able to lay out multimedia content.