In addition, industrial VR systems can be utilized for other critical tasks, such as prototyping of AR-based (Augmented Reality) in-field guidance for maintenance technicians [14], which in turn is another desired technology of Industry 4.0 to enhance maintenance services [22; 23; 24]. Despite all the benefits, industrial use of VR technology is still associated with a high cost-to-benefit ratio. Implementation is slowed down due to significant implementation costs [25], since every employee should have Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) and/or powerful personal computers to utilize VR in their work. Additionally, the pandemic caused significant disruptions for supply chains for HMDs and PCs, further hindering the adoption rate of VR technologies in industries. This obstacle might be partly addressed with _asymmetric VR_ usage, a relatively fresh research direction, studying the use of VR among devices with different levels of immersion and control, focusing on non-HMD user groups. The current body of research on asymmetry is mostly focused on co-located settings [26; 27; 28; 29], where the physical presence of collaborators is an important design factor. With forced social isolation, due to the worldwide pandemic, remote collaboration and, particularly, distributed asymmetric VR, becomes a more prominent research direction, the nature of which is still not fully explored [13; 30]. By distributed asymmetric VR we refer to the technically supported remote collaboration of global teams, who use VR as an enhancement technology and have different access to it. In our case, we investigated the asymmetry when merging the collaboration over two digital worlds: the COVE-VR platform (see Figure 1) and Microsoft Teams (the company's existing communication and teamwork tool). One distributed user group (referred to as VR-users) is present in the immersive multi-user collaborative environment, wearing HMDs and can interact with 3D CAD models and virtual tools. The second user group (referred to as Teams-users or non-interactive desktop users) can see the virtual environment through the eyes of VR-users and communicate with them via voice connection. Despite Teams users having no interaction with the virtual environment itself, they still have an active participatory role in the collaboration process by taking notes and snapshots with their laptop tools, thus contributing to the shared tasks. This practical approach originated as a response to a preceding study [31; 32], which suggested that the increased visualization capabilities of VR may be achieved even with a single user being present in VR and their interactions recorded or streamed to other industrial groups. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the availability of VR equipment on the global market and set some limitations to the study setup. The _goal of the study_ was to explore how distributed asymmetric VR usage between VR and Teams users may shift traditional industrial practices in the pipeline of maintenance method development and technical documentation creation. The study addressed the following research questions:  
**RQ1**: _What are the relevant and beneficial use cases of applying asymmetric VR to aid industrial collaboration activities of geographically distributed teams?_  
**RQ2**: _How to efficiently adopt distributed asymmetry between VR platforms and traditional conferencing tools in the industrial context?_  
To address the research questions and explore the asymmetry between a traditional conferencing tool and a VR platform in the industrial context, we conducted a remote user study with 20 experts from 4 countries: Finland, China, India and the USA. The study procedure was built to replicate the actual industrial tasks between geographically isolated teams.