Point-cloud avatars to improve spatial communication in immersive collaborative virtual environments

Abstract

Collaborative virtual environments allow remote users to work together in a shared 3D space. To take advantage of the possibilities offered by such systems, their design must allow the users to interact and communicate efficiently. One open question in this field concerns the avatar fidelity of remote partners. This can impact communication between the remote users, more particularly when performing collaborative spatial tasks. In this paper, we present an experimental study comparing the effects of two partner's avatars on collaboration during spatial tasks. The first avatar was based on a 2.5D streamed point-cloud and the second avatar was based on a 3D preconstructed avatar replicating the remote user movements. These avatars differ in their fidelity levels described through two components: visual and kinematic fidelity. The collaborative performance was evaluated through the efficacy of completing two spatial communication tasks, a pointing task and spatial guidance task. The results indicate that the streamed point-cloud avatar permitted a significant improvement of the collaborative performance for both tasks. The subjective evaluation suggests that these differences in performance can mainly be attributed to the higher kinematic fidelity of this representation as compared to the 3D preconstructed avatar representation. We conclude that, when designing spatial collaborative virtual environments, it is important to reach a high kinematic fidelity of the partner's representation while a moderate visual fidelity of this representation can suffice.

Study of communication modalities for teaching distance information

“…The low scores in the visual modality could be associated with using a non-animated hand avatar. Indeed, the low kinematic fidelity of the partner's avatar has already been reported to impact this dimension [5] negatively. In contrast, the haptic modality has been reported to increase the feeling of closeness and intimacy with others [6].…”

Quality of Experience in Telemeetings and Videoconferencing: A Comprehensive Survey

“…In terms of technology, developments either extend conventional video conferencing solutions [377] or aim for a completely new volumetric technology [377], [378], which brings them perhaps also closer to gaming technology. These technology development paths have profound effects on various SIFs, beginning from setting up and controlling the telemeeting to the aforementioned media richness aspects (see Section IV).…”

“…One dimension is the enabled DoF, ranging from 2D screens with the users confined to a rather narrow field of view in front of their screens [132], typically with non-spatial audio, over 360 VR (3-DoF) to 6-DoF VR or AR, including representations of the other participants that more plausibly integrate with the virtual (VR) or real environment (AR), including either headtracked headphone-or loudspeaker-based spatial audio. The other dimension is the user representation, ranging from artificial avatars to photorealistic representations based on conventional video capture, or video-or geometry-based Point Clouds, or other volumetric representations [377], [378], [386].…”

Edge-Selective Feature Weaving for Point Cloud Matching

“…Matching of two sample elements is a fundamental research topic in the field of computer vision [10,17,45]. Among various matching topics, 3D point cloud registration has been an essential, challenging task with the recent spread of 3D sensing technologies and 3D point cloud applications [10,45] (e.g., autonomous driving [2] and immersive communications [6]). The goal of most 3D point cloud registration methods is to find the correspondences between Our proposed network can be jointly optimized with the feature extractor network to achieve robustness against errors in the extracted features and to maximize the performance of the feature extractor.…”