ShiSha: Enabling Shared Perspective with Face-to-Face Collaboration Using Redirected Avatars in Virtual Reality

The importance of remote collaboration grows in an interconnected world as the reasons to avoid travel increase. The spatial rendering and collaboration capabilities of virtual and augmented reality systems are well suited for tasks such as support or training. Users can take a shared perspective to build a common understanding. Also, users may engage in face-to-face cooperation to support interpersonal communication. However, a shared perspective and face-to-face collaboration are both desirable but naturally exclude each other. We place all users at the same location to provide a shared perspective. To avoid overlapping body parts, the avatars of the other connected users are shifted to the side. A redirected body pose modification corrects the resulting inconsistencies. The implemented system is compared to a baseline of two users standing in the same location and working with overlapping avatars. The results of a user study show that the proposed modifications provide an easy to use, efficient collaboration and yield higher co-presence and the feeling of teamwork. Applying redirection techniques to other users opens up novel ways to increase social presence for local or remote collaboration.