Nice is Different than Good: Longitudinal Communicative Effects of Realistic and Cartoon Avatars in Real Mixed Reality Work Meetings

We report a within-subjects study of the effect of realistic and cartoon avatars on communication, task satisfaction, and perceived sense of presence in mixed reality meetings. For 2 − 3 weeks, six groups of co-workers (14 people) held a recurring real work meeting using Microsoft HoloLens2 devices. Each person embodied a personalised full-body avatar with a realistic face and another with a cartoon face. Half the groups started in the realistic condition and the other half started in the cartoon condition; all groups switched conditions half-way. Initial results show that, overall, participants found the realistic avatars’ nonverbal behaviour more appropriate for the interaction and more useful for understanding their colleagues compared to the cartoon one. Regarding the results over time, we identify different insights for cartoon and realistic avatars based on the type of avatar was embodied first. We discuss the implications of these results for mixed and virtual reality meetings

A mixed reality telepresence system for collaborative space operation

This paper presents a Mixed Reality system that results from the integration of a telepresence system and an application to improve collaborative space exploration. The system combines free viewpoint video with immersive projection technology to support non-verbal communication, including eye gaze, inter-personal distance and facial expression. Importantly, these can be interpreted together as people move around the simulation, maintaining natural social distance. The application is a simulation of Mars, within which the collaborators must come to agreement over, for example, where the Rover should land and go. The first contribution is the creation of a Mixed Reality system supporting contextualization of non-verbal communication. Tw technological contributions are prototyping a technique to subtract a person from a background that may contain physical objects and/or moving images, and a light weight texturing method for multi-view rendering which provides balance in terms of visual and temporal quality. A practical contribution is the demonstration of pragmatic approaches to sharing space between display systems of distinct levels of immersion. A research tool contribution is a system that allows comparison of conventional authored and video based reconstructed avatars, within an environment that encourages exploration and social interaction. Aspects of system quality, including the communication of facial expression and end-to-end latency are reported

Telethrone : a situated display using retro-reflection basedmulti-view toward remote collaboration in small dynamic groups

This research identifies a gap in the tele-communication technology. Several novel technology demonstrators are tested experimentally throughout the research. The presented final system allows a remote participant in a conversation to unambiguously address individual members of a group of 5 people using non-verbal cues. The capability to link less formal groups through technology is the primary contribution. Technology-mediated communication is first reviewed, with attention to different supported styles of meetings. A gap is identified for small informal groups. Small dynamic groups which are convened on demand for the solution of specific problems may be called “ad-hoc”. In these meetings it is possible to ‘pull up a chair’. This is poorly supported by current tele-communication tools, that is, it is difficult for one or more members to join such a meeting from a remote location. It is also difficult for physically located parties to reorient themselves in the meeting as goals evolve. As the major contribution toward addressing this the ’Telethrone’ is introduced. Telethrone projects a remote user onto a chair, bringing them into your space. The chair seems to act as a situated display, which can support multi party head gaze, eye gaze, and body torque. Each observer knows where the projected user is looking. It is simpler to implement and cheaper than current comparable systems. The underpinning approach is technology and systems development, with regard to HCI and psychology throughout. Prototypes, refinements, and novel engineered systems are presented. Two experiments to test these systems are peer-reviewed, and further design & experimentation undertaken based on the positive results. The final paper is pending. An initial version of the new technology approach combined retro-reflective material with aligned pairs of cameras, and projectors, connected by IP video. A counterbalanced repeated measures experiment to analyse gaze interactions was undertaken. Results suggest that the remote user is not excluded from triadic poker game-play. Analysis of the multi-view aspect of the system was inconclusive as to whether it shows advantage over a set-up which does not support multi-view. User impressions from the questionnaires suggest that the current implementation still gives the impression of being a display despite its situated nature, although participants did feel the remote user was in the space with them. A refinement of the system using models generated by visual hull reconstruction can better connect eye gaze. An exploration is made of its ability to allow chairs to be moved around the meeting, and what this might enable for the participants of the meeting. The ability to move furniture was earlier identified as an aid to natural interaction, but may also affect highly correlated subgroups in an ad-hoc meeting. This is unsupported by current technologies. Repositioning of several onlooking chairs seems to support ’fault lines’. Performance constraints of the current system are explored. An experiment tests whether it is possible to judge remote participant eye gaze as the viewer changes location, attempting to address concerns raised by the first experiment in which the physical offsets of the IP cameras lenses from the projected eyes of the remote participants (in both directions), may have influenced perception of attention. A third experiment shows that five participants viewing a remote recording, presented through the Telethrone, can judge the attention of the remote participant accurately when the viewpoint is correctly rendered for their location in the room. This is compared to a control in which spatial discrimination is impossible. A figure for how many optically seperate retro-reflected segments is obtained through spatial anlysis and testing. It is possible to render the optical maximum of 5 independent viewpoints supporting an ’ideal’ meeting of 6 people. The tested system uses one computer at the meeting side of the exchange making it potentially deployable from a small flight case. The thesis presents and tests the utility of elements toward a system, and finds that remote users are in the conversation, spatially segmented with a view for each onlooker, that eye gaze can be reconnected through the system using 3D video, and that performance supports scalability up to the theoretical maximum for the material and an ideal meeting size

From 3D Bimanual Toward Distant Collaborative Interaction Techniques: An Awareness Issue

International audienceThis paper aims to raise the question : "How much 3D bimanual interaction techniques can be useful to the design of collaborative interaction techniques in the field of Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE)?". Indeed, CVE involve the use of complex interaction techniques based on specific collaborative metaphors. The design of these metaphors may be a difficult task because it has to deal with collaborative issues that came from sparse research areas (Human-Computer Interfaces, Human-Human Interactions, Networking, Physiology and Social Psychology). Metaphors for bimanual interactions have been developed for a while essentially because it is a widely spread area of interest for common tasks. Bimanual interactions involve the simultaneous use of both hands of the user in order to achieve a goal with better performances compared to uni-manual interactions thanks to a natural skill that is proprioception. This collaborative aspect could certainly be a helpful entry point in the design of efficient collaborative interaction techniques extended from improved bimanual metaphors. However, the proprioceptive sense cannot be considered in the same way, and additional features must be proposed to be able to collaborate efficiently. Thus, awareness is a key to let CVE be usable and the availability of collaborative feedbacks is essential to extend bimanual interactions toward collaborative ones. In this paper, we based our study on existing work on bimanual and collaborative interaction techniques trying to draw similarities between them. We emphasize common points between both fields that could be useful to better design both metaphors and awareness in CVE

Social Interactions in Immersive Virtual Environments: People, Agents, and Avatars

Immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have received increased popularity with applications in many fields. IVEs aim to approximate real environments, and to make users react similarly to how they would in everyday life. An important use case is the users-virtual characters (VCs) interaction. We interact with other people every day, hence we expect others to appropriately act and behave, verbally and non-verbally (i.e., pitch, proximity, gaze, turn-taking). These expectations also apply to interactions with VCs in IVEs, and this thesis tackles some of these aspects. We present three projects that inform the area of social interactions with a VC in IVEs, focusing on non-verbal behaviours. In our first study on interactions between people, we collaborated with the Social Neuroscience group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL on a dyad multi-modal interaction. This aims to understand the conversation dynamics, focusing on gaze and turn-taking. The results show that people have a higher frequency of gaze change (from averted to direct and vice versa) when they are being looked at compared to when they are not. When they are not being looked at, they are also directing their gaze to their partners more compared to when they are being looked at. Another contribution of this work is the automated method of annotating speech and gaze data. Next, we consider agents’ higher-level non-verbal behaviours, covering social attitudes. We present a pipeline to collect data and train a machine learning (ML) model that detects social attitudes in a user-VC interaction. Here we collaborated with two game studios: Dream Reality Interaction and Maze Theory. We present a case study for the ML pipeline on social engagement recognition for the Peaky Blinders narrative VR game from Maze Theory studio. We use a reinforcement learning algorithm with imitation learning rewards and a temporal memory element. The results show that the model trained with raw data does not generalise and performs worse (60% accuracy) than the one trained with socially meaningful data (83% accuracy). In IVEs, people embody avatars and their appearance can impact social interactions. In collaboration with Microsoft Research, we report a longitudinal study in mixed-reality on avatar appearance in real-work meetings between co-workers comparing personalised full-body realistic and cartoon avatars. The results imply that when participants use realistic avatars first, they may have higher expectations and they perceive their colleagues’ emotional states with less accuracy. Participants may also become more accustomed to cartoon avatars as time passes and the overall use of avatars may lead to less accurately perceiving negative emotions. The work presented here contributes towards the field of detecting and generating nonverbal cues for VCs in IVEs. These are also important building blocks for creating autonomous agents for IVEs. Additionally, this work contributes to the games and work industry fields through an immersive ML pipeline for detecting social attitudes and through insights into using different avatar styles over time in real-world meetings