360Anywhere

Abstract

360-degree video is increasingly used to create immersive user experiences; however, it is typically limited to a single user and not interactive. Recent studies have explored the potential of 360 video to support multi-user collaboration in remote settings. These studies identified several challenges with respect to 360 live streams, such as the lack of gaze awareness, out-of-sync views, and missed gestures. To address these challenges, we created 360Anywhere, a framework for 360 video-based multi-user collaboration that, in addition to allowing collaborators to view and annotate a 360 live stream, also supports projection of annotations in the 360 stream back into the real-world environment in real-time. This enables a range of collaborative augmented reality applications not supported with existing tools. We present the 360Anywhere framework and tools that allow users to generate applications tailored to specific collaboration and augmentation needs with support for remote collaboration. In a series of exploratory design sessions with users, we assess 360Anywhere's power and flexibility for three mobile ad-hoc scenarios. Using 360Anywhere, participants were able to set up and use fairly complex remote collaboration systems involving projective augmented reality in less than 10 minutes.

MAGIC: Manipulating Avatars and Gestures to Improve Remote Collaboration

“…Speicher et al [65] provided users with a third-person view by default but enabled one collaborator at a time to gain control over everyone's 360°video. This enabled all collaborators to view directions in a synchronized manner.…”

Loki

“…Prior work in collaborative telepresence has shown the needs as well as benefits of access to multiple viewpoints of the remote collaborator [8,11,22,30,31,35,40,44,46]. There have been different techniques proposed to provide these viewpoints, such as providing controls for a mobile camera [8,40] but these approaches can add to the cognitive load of the user, requiring them to understand the spatial layout of each camera and actively manipulate them.…”