Visual Guidance for User Placement in Avatar-Mediated Telepresence between Dissimilar Spaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual guidance system for avatar-mediated telepresence that helps users find optimal placements for effective interaction across dissimilar spaces, enhancing gaze and pointing transfer in VR and MR environments.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel angle-based scoring and visualization method for guiding user placement in avatar-mediated telepresence across different spatial configurations.

Findings

Score measure aligns with user perception of interaction context.

Visualization improves user understanding of optimal placements.

Method effective in real-world MR scenarios.

Abstract

Rapid advances in technology gradually realize immersive mixed-reality (MR) telepresence between distant spaces. This paper presents a novel visual guidance system for avatar-mediated telepresence, directing users to optimal placements that facilitate the clear transfer of gaze and pointing contexts through remote avatars in dissimilar spaces, where the spatial relationship between the remote avatar and the interaction targets may differ from that of the local user. Representing the spatial relationship between the user/avatar and interaction targets with angle-based interaction features, we assign recommendation scores of sampled local placements as their maximum feature similarity with remote placements. These scores are visualized as color-coded 2D sectors to inform the users of better placements for interaction with selected targets. In addition, virtual objects of the remote space are overlapped with the local space for the user to better understand the recommendations. We examine whether the proposed score measure agrees with the actual user perception of the partner's interaction context and find a score threshold for recommendation through user experiments in virtual reality (VR). A subsequent user study in VR investigates the effectiveness and perceptual overload of different combinations of visualizations. Finally, we conduct a user study in an MR telepresence scenario to evaluate the effectiveness of our method in real-world applications.