A Full Body Avatar-Based Telepresence System for Dissimilar Spaces
This addresses the challenge of immersive telepresence for users in dissimilar spaces, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing telepresence methods with specific adaptations.
The paper tackles the problem of mismatched placement and gestures in mixed reality telepresence when remote rooms differ in size and layout, by retargeting user motion to avatars to preserve interaction context, enabling avatars to use real furniture and interact as if in the same room.
We present a novel mixed reality (MR) telepresence system enabling a local user to interact with a remote user through full-body avatars in their own rooms. If the remote rooms have different sizes and furniture arrangements, directly applying a user's motion to an avatar leads to a mismatch of placement and deictic gesture. To overcome this problem, we retarget the placement, arm gesture, and head movement of a local user to an avatar in a remote room to preserve a local user's environment and interaction context. This allows avatars to utilize real furniture and interact with a local user and shared objects as if they were in the same room. This paper describes our system's design and implementation in detail and a set of example scenarios in the living room and office room. A qualitative user study delves into a user experience, challenges, and possible extensions of the proposed system.