<title>Collaborative immersive workspace through a shared augmented environment</title>

Abstract

ABSTRACT We focus on a shared augmented environment (SAE) as an almost ideal face-to-face collaborative virtualworkspace. In an SAE, multiple users can observe both a virtual world and real partners through opticalsee-through head mounted displays (STHMDs). This paper describes two experiments for verifying theeffectiveness of an SAE compared with a conventional shared virtual environment (SVE) and exploringimprovement of them. Through the experiments, the effectiveness of an SAE compared with an SVE wasconfirmed. It was also confirmed that enhancement of the shared environment with computer graphics, i.e.displaying a partner's body in an SVE, drawing a line as a partner's viewing direction and emphasizingvirtual objects to which a partner pay attention, improves workers' feeling and collaboration efficiency.Keywords: collaboration, virtual reality, augmented reality, face-to-face interaction. 1. INTRODUCTION In the last decade, computers have been used for supporting not only desktop collaboration but alsospatial collaboration using virtual reality techniques. Multiple users can share a virtual workspace andsolve a variety of problems cooperatively in the shared virtual environment (SVE). However, because ofpoor computer-generated representation of remote participants and communication delay, collaborationwithin an SVE has a serious drawback compared with collaboration within the real world. That is,awareness information is hard to be transferred so that each participant has significant difficulty inrecognizing what other participants are doing.On the other hand, several attempts have been made to construct more informative and more naturalcollaborative workspace, in which two participants are at the same location. Such workspaces permitface-to-face interaction, and still support real-time 3-D computer graphics from respective participants'viewpoints. Some systems consist of a rear projector and two pairs of liquid crystal shuttered glasses,others employ two optical see-through head mounted displays (STHMDs). In this paper, we focus on thelatter type, because virtual objects can be displayed at arbitrary positions, e.g., between two participants