Brick-Building Interface Support for Cocreative Communication

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To support cocreative communication between people who are in separate, remote locations, embodied communication (communication expressed through the physical body) is crucial, and a common place for communication should be established. This article proposes an idea to integrate remote physical places into a shared virtual space to bridge these remote places and to describe interface systems for cocreative communication. To show a typical example of cocreative communication with a high degree of freedom for bodily actions, this study focused on brick-building play, in which people are free to construct structures spatially with physical objects. For remote collaborative communication, including modeling with physical bricks at each physical place, two interface systems were designed: the brick-modeling interface system and the brick-reader glove interface system. The brick-modeling interface system makes it possible for users to act out others' brick plays with physical bricks in the remote places and in shared virtual space in real time. The brick-reader glove interface system enables users to act out the modeling process with virtual bricks and virtual avatars of both remote users in the shared virtual space. The experiment clearly suggests that these interface systems are useful for creating a shared virtual space and for supporting collaborative work in three dimensions with a sense that the remote people were together in the same place.