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

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Virtual Reality
• Mixed Reality

Background:

• Mixed-reality (MR) telepresence enables immersive remote collaboration.
• Avatar-mediated interactions require effective spatial context transfer.
• Current systems lack guidance for optimal user placement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a visual guidance system for avatar-mediated MR telepresence.
• To improve the transfer of gaze and pointing contexts between users in different spaces.
• To enhance user placement for effective remote interaction.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel visual guidance system using angle-based interaction features and recommendation scores.
• Visualized placement recommendations using color-coded 2D sectors and overlapped virtual objects.
• Conducted user experiments in virtual reality (VR) to validate the score measure and visualization effectiveness.
• Evaluated the system in a real-world MR telepresence scenario.

Main Results:

• The proposed score measure correlates with user perception of interaction context.
• A score threshold for effective recommendations was identified through VR user experiments.
• Different visualization combinations were assessed for effectiveness and perceptual load in VR.
• The system demonstrated effectiveness in real-world MR telepresence applications.

Conclusions:

• The visual guidance system effectively directs users to optimal placements for improved avatar-mediated telepresence.
• The method enhances the transfer of interaction contexts like gaze and pointing in dissimilar spaces.
• This research contributes to more intuitive and effective remote collaboration in mixed-reality environments.