Enhancing the Perception of Collaborative Actions with Virtual Gestures

This paper proposes using virtual reality to enhance the perception of actions by distant users on a shared application. Here, distance may refer either to space (e.g. in a remote synchronous collaboration) or time (e.g. during playback of recorded actions). Our approach consists in immersing the application in a virtual inhabited 3D space and mimicking user actions by animating avatars whose motion can be either generated from user actions on the shared application or from motion capture by a computer vision system we briefly describe. We illustrate this approach with two applications, one for remote collaboration on a shared application and the other to playback recorded sequences of user actions. We suggest this could be a low cost enhancement for telepresence. CR Categories: I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism; I.3.2 Graphics Systems;. I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding.