  There is a great body of work in the areas of
tele-assistance/tele-collaboration offering novel and effective ways to improve
collaboration between personnel located at a remote mine site and off-site
personnel located in major metropolitan areas. Much of this work involves the
use of high-bandwidth communications or targeted sensory experiences using
large format displays. There are also existing remote access technologies but
these suffer from limited functionality (providing text, voice, video or
one-way desktop sharing), are often poorly supported in the security-conscious
corporate environment and require complicated set up processes. There is
currently no singular piece of remote collaboration technology that is suitable
for the delivery of high-quality planning and scheduling services to clients at
a mining site from a remote operating centre. In response to this issue, as
part of a research and technology development effort between CSIRO and a mining
engineering firm, we have developed a concept of remote mining engineer (RME)
and conducted a functional requirements analysis for delivering mining
engineering services to mine sites remotely. Based on the obtained
requirements, a further study was performed to characterise existing
technologies and to identify the scope for future work in designing and
prototyping a network based system for RME. We report on the method and
findings of this study in this paper.
