Ms. Ref. No.: SMEJMS-D-21-00703
Title: BeHere: A VR/SAR Remote Collaboration System based on Virtual Replicas Sharing Gesture and Avatar in a Procedural Task
Journal of Manufacturing Systems
Dear Dr. Peng Wang,
I regret to inform you that your manuscript as described does not meet the quality standard of JMS, and I must therefore reject it.
We appreciate you submitting your manuscript to Journal of Manufacturing Systems and thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work
Yours sincerely,
Lihui Wang
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Manufacturing Systems
Reviewers' comments:
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Although the problems being addressed are potentially of interest to our readership, your manuscript does not meet the required quality standards to be considered for publication.
Reviewer #1: It is an interesting paper, however there are several issues that need to be addressed:
1. The background of this paper is not clear so that the readers are hard to understand the aim of this research. The authors should clarify the scope and the solved problem of this research, i.e., the significance and the problems for remote assembly training in manufacturing.
2. The literature review is not enough and clear so that the readers are hard to understand the current search about remote assembly training in manufacturing and their problems as well as the novelty of this paper.
3. The authors did much similar research, however the difference between them and the research proposed in this paper is not be explained clearly so that the novelty of this paper is difficult to be recognized. The authors should clarify their difference clearly.
4. In Section 3, the authors doesn't very well explain the proposed system (method), and the combination of gestures, avatar with virtual replicas. In addition, relative to other sections such as pilot test and user study, the content of this section is much less, which is confusing because it should be highlighted. It seems that much emphasis is put on pilot test and user study, instead of the proposed system (method).
5. For better show the advantage of the proposed system(method) in this paper, the authors should add the comparison between the existing systems (methods) in the literature review and the proposed system (method) in this paper.
6.Based the above problems, the title of this paper needs to be improved.
7. Equation (2) needs be corrected.
8. The grammar and format of the paper such as the format of the reference 2 and 17 in the References section and so on need to be checked.
Reviewer #2: In this paper, the users' experiences are analyzed for a developed VR/SAR remote collaboration system. The contents are interesting but the motivations of the work are not clear which undercuts the significance of the research.
Although the developed system is probably the first one which could include local participant's 3D avatar into the virtual reality environment with that the remote participant work, there is no clear motivation to do this. Moreover there is no significant difference regarding objective measure, performance time of an assembly task. Obviously the rendering of live 3D avatar of local participant will increase the data processing load, however the investigated user case cannot support the need of live 3D avatar of local participant even the current users' experience analysis results show that it could help.
The current users' experience analysis methodology can be improved. For example, the live 3D avatar of local participant is actually represented by a skeleton, the existing of a just represents the existing of local participant. However, the remote participant and local participant are actually in the same location and can hear each other which could enhance the feeling of co-presence. How to prove the existing of a skeleton can improve the feeling of co-presence is not clear.
Therefore, the work should be re-investigated and is not recommended for publishing.
