Identifying tools for remotely located collaborative interactions

There exist various tools for remotely located interactions for several modes of interactions, such as Textual, Audio, Video and Screen Share modes. In this work, our aim is to understand the minimum collaborative interaction tool required for successful remotely located collaborative interaction. We conducted a number of experiments with products with increasing number of future complexities, e.g. difficulty of explaining the complexity of product (Component, Assembly, Revision, and New Component Design) using different techniques of interaction to identify the minimum facility that a company should have to enable remotely located interactions (working with existing designs and new designs) during product design. Often, small and medium scale companies are unable to afford expensive collaborative equipments to enable remotely located interactions and often they are confused which systems they should possess for different modes of communications. Hence, this paper aims to help in selecting the appropriate modes of interactions based on the need of a company.