Whale Tank Virtual Reality

Whale Tank Virtual Reality is a novel technique for collocated collaboration in virtual reality. It provides a simple solution for head-coupled virtual reality technology allowing more than one user at a time to observe a 3D scene from a correct perspective. Whale Tank VR employs natural interaction using a large touch screen display. It provides each user with a personal viewport into the virtual scene that may be joined and shared with other users' viewports in certain circumstances of collaboration. We conducted an experiment to study the influence of head coupling on users' awareness-and-recall of collocated coworker's actions. The study employed a simulated collaborative situation under several levels of task difficulty. The results revealed no statistically significant difference in awareness-and-recall performance with or without the presence of head coupling. This suggests that in situations where head coupling is employed, there is no degradation in users' awareness of collocated activity. There are a number of benefits to Whale Tank VR. The head coupling is advantageous because it allows a user to experience the sense of a third dimension and to observe difficult-to-see objects without requiring additional navigation other than natural head movement. The multiple viewports available in our Whale Tank VR technique enable collocated collaboration by seamlessly adjusting the head-coupled perspectives in each viewport according to the proximity of the collaborators to ensure a consistent display at all times.