Supporting social human communication between distributed walk-in displays

Abstract

Future teleconferencing may enhance communication between remote people by supporting non-verbal communication within an unconstrained space where people can move around and share the manipulation of artefacts. By linking walk-in displays with a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) platform we are able to physically situate a distributed team in a spatially organised social and information context. We have found this to demonstrate unprecedented naturalness in the use of space and body during non-verbal communication and interaction with objects.However, relatively little is known about how people interact through this technology, especially while sharing the manipulation of objects. We observed people engaged in such a task while geographically separated across national boundaries. Our analysis is organised into collaborative scenarios, that each requires a distinct balance of social human communication with consistent shared manipulation of objects.Observational results suggest that walk-in displays do not suffer from some of the important drawbacks of other displays. Previous trials have shown that supporting natural non-verbal communication, along with responsive and consistent shared object manipulation, is hard to achieve. To better understand this problem, we take a close look at how the scenario impacts on the characteristics of event traffic. We conclude by suggesting how various strategies might reduce the consistency problem for particular scenarios.

A review on effective closely-coupled collaboration using immersive CVE's

“…The user did not need to get close to the object, but could do everything from a remote place, from which the whole scene could be observed. However, in previous studies this behaviour was reason for complaint as other collaborating users could not see the correlation between a user and the object they were interacting with [Hindmarsh et al 2000;Roberts et al 2004b]. In addition, working from a remote place is only possible if the given environment supports such behaviour, for example -a world without walls or very large rooms.…”

Eye gaze in virtual environments: evaluating the need and initial work on implementation

“…is the user rotating their head about the neck or are they actually rotating their whole body. Current systems typically only track this limited form of movement by the user, but studies have shown that immersive Collaborative Virtual Environments provide a powerful means for communication [15]. There are systems that are becoming more common place that could track the users' bodies in greater detail, for example, see [16] that utilizes an optical tracking system to track hand movements for gesture recognition within a system.…”

An assessment of eye-gaze potential within immersive virtual environments

“…The collaborative virtual environment chosen was ICE [Roberts et al 2004]. As the eye-tracking hardware had already been linked to VRPN, it was now only necessary to make ICE link to VRPN to pick up the eye-tracking values and to modify the avatar so that the eyes would be displayed correctly.…”

“…This limits the amount of information that can be conveyed from one person to another when they are collaborating between IPTs. Studies have still shown that even with this limited form of movement tracking, immersive CVEs provide a powerful means for communication [Schroeder et al 2001;Steed et al 2003;Roberts et al 2004]. There are systems becoming more commonplace that could track the users' bodies in greater detail; for example, see Murray et al [2003], that utilizes an optical tracking system to track hand movements for gesture recognition within a system.…”