Merging environments for shared spaces in mixed reality

Abstract

In virtual reality a real walking interface limits the extent of a virtual environment to our local walkable space. As local spaces are specific to each user, sharing a virtual environment with others for collaborative work or games becomes complicated. It is not clear which user's walkable space to prefer, or whether that space will be navigable for both users. This paper presents a technique which allows users to interact in virtual reality while each has a different walkable space. With this method mappings are created between pairs of environments. Remote users are then placed in the local environment as determined by the corresponding mapping. A user study was conducted with 38 participants. Pairs of participants were invited to collaborate on a virtual reality puzzle-solving task while in two different virtual rooms. An avatar representing the remote user was mapped into the local user's space. The results suggest that collaborative systems can be based on local representations that are actually quite different.