A Cross Reality Teleconference Bridge to incorporate 3D interactivity to 2D Teleconferencing
Background
In the current COVID-19 era, many people adapt to work, study, or play from home and communicate with others by using various video conferencing tools. However, some may discover the limitations of these tools when they try to present 3D spatial concepts or convey natural non-verbal communication cues through 2D camera feeds.
Virtual Reality can enable users to present themselves and their ideas in existing teleconferencing solutions in a more interactively and deliver much more information than2D camera video
Researchers showed that Spatial cues like hand gestures and eye gaze improve co-presence in remote collaboration[1] Asymmetrical remote environments provide richer experience to remote participants[2]
Our Contribution:
Leverage the ability of VR to showcase natural non-verbal communication cues to provide a richer experience from within the traditional teleconference platform. Proposed novel experimental paradigm to investigate usability of a hybrid system in remote collaboration.
Summary
- Created a VR solution that can.
- Provide a three dimensional virtual environment for presenter(Fig 2).
- Be integrated into existing teleconferencing solutions like zoom, skype etc..(Fig 1)
- Provide users with tools to create and manipulate 3D objects in virtual environment.
- We plan to analyze the usability of the system by
- Comparing modes of interactions for the virtual camera in the scene(Fig 3).
- Comparing modes of interaction for the desktop mirroring(zoom window – Fig 5) within the scene.
- Co-located collaboration capabilities enables more than one presenter to share the virtual space (Fig 4).
- With this, users can visit places and manipulate objects that might not be possible in the physical world while taking webcam participants along for the ride.
References
[1] Huidong Bai, Prasanth Sasikumar, Jing Yang, and Mark Billinghurst. 2020. A User Study on Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration with Eye Gaze and Hand Gesture Sharing. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–13 [2] Henry Chen, Et.al. 2015. 3D collaboration method over HoloLens™ and Skype™ end points. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Immersive Media Experiences. 27–30.
