Towards a Practical Virtual Office for Mobile Knowledge Workers

Abstract

Figure 1. Left: Virtual Reality (VR) enables customized office environments, including large displays and background disturbance reduction, even in challenging environments such as airplanes. To this end, the interaction space is designed to be as small as possible to avoid interfering with the physical environment. Middle: A user interacts with remote participants in a physical office over a tabletop using physical screens as surrogates [59]. Right: The same setting in VR with virtual representation of users.

Creating and Augmenting Keyboards for Extended Reality with the K eyboard A ugmentation T oolkit

“…In short, there are compelling arguments that this combination could see adoption in the future, particularly if virtual workspaces, driven by MR headsets, such as recently envisioned both in industry (e.g. the Oculus "infinite office" concept [76]) and in research [28,65,78] However, there are alternate routes toward further enhancing our ability to interact using physical keyboards, of which augmented keyboards is just one such instance. Consider launchers such as Blur [18,89], Alfred [87], Spotlight [3], LaunchBar [75], Wox [68] and Hain [54].…”

“…MR headsets can augment tracked objects [9], peripherals and surfaces [8,42], meaning a physical keyboards form and function could be altered/augmented by such headsets [12]. This is of increasing relevance given the potential for MR to enhance productivity environments in particular, demonstrated both in research [28,65,78] and by industry, for example through the Oculus "infinite office" concept [76].…”

ModularHMD: A Reconfigurable Mobile Head-Mounted Display Enabling Ad-hoc Peripheral Interactions with the Real World

“…Mobile HMDs are used in shared spaces [36,84], homes [78], offices [25,63], and in transportation like trains and airplanes [4,53]. For such location-independent VR offices, Grubert et al [19] argued that high mobility and immersiveness are the core elements of HMDs, but they also indicate the critical issues of the existing HMDs that arise from their occlusive cowls: lower situational awareness of the real world, poor physical interaction, hindered communication among users, and poor text-typing performance.…”

“…physically in an office [25,63], in shared spaces [36,84], or on transportation like trains and airplanes [4,53], etc. In such scenarios, HMD users require a certain level of situational awareness of the real world to respond to sudden physical interactions or nearby actions from non-HMD users.…”

From Shielding to Avoidance: Passenger Augmented Reality and the Layout of Virtual Displays for Productivity in Shared Transit

“…Virtual displays (typically referring to virtual containers for positioning 2/3D application content [43]) can be sized, oriented and positioned flexibly, based on user needs and comfort. Virtual displays allow the creation of a private virtual space [33] or virtual office [48], shielding passengers from undesirable behaviours and auditory or visual noise. They can overcome the problems of personal devices as they can adapt based on the travel environment visibility [43,44,47] and passengers' social connectedness to, and awareness of, other travellers [2].…”