Abstract

A mixed-reality team room project, ClearWorlds aims to support teams that include local members and those working remotely from home offices, hotel rooms, or other off-site locations. To provide equal access to the team room, we’re using a virtual world, developed using the Project Wonderland toolkit, as the primary team space. In the virtual team room, users can create and share spatial organizations of content that persist over time. Our goal is to use mixed-reality techniques to produce a consistent spatial relationship between users and their working documents. We’ve started with a focus on virtual whiteboards, using them as a bridge between the physical and virtual world.
Inspired by Hiroshi Ishii’s concept of the ClearBoard, we’re creating a “clear” interactive whiteboard. We’re experimenting with using avatars in place of video to reconstruct the image of collaborators “behind” the physical drawing surface, and transmitting gaze, gesture, and facial expressions using off-the-shelf face-tracking and gesture-tracking software. We’re exploring a configuration in which we mirror back to the user their own avatar representation, effectively constructing the illusion that the in-room user and the remote collaborators are working side-by-side in the virtual world. Prior work suggests that this “space sharing” technique gives users a greater sense of co-presence, and the approach helps avoid situations where users form separate groups on opposite sides of a whiteboard or wall.