In high-stakes collaborative situations, a decline in collaboration quality can lead to adverse events with significant consequences. Analyses performed by Human factor (HF) specialists, while effective in identifying and addressing collaboration issues, are case-specific and most of the time performed a posteriori. To address these limitations, our research focuses on a real-time assessment of collaboration processes using multimodal signals collected and analyzed during the activity. Existing collaboration profiles taxonomies face limitations such as a posteriori profiles detection and the absence of quantitative behavioral indicators that can be measured during the activity. Leveraging Virtual Reality (VR), we have developed a framework for evaluating collaboration in controlled setting, testing the effectiveness of a subset of multimodal signals to detect collaboration profiles. We test our approach in a study including 11 stereotyped collaborative scenarios applied to a VR puzzle-solving task. This study reveals the effectiveness of our approach in distinguishing between non-collaborative and highly collaborative profiles. However, challenges arise in discriminating between closely related collaborative profiles. This paper also proposes some guidelines on how to improve the collaboration profile detection framework and address other collaborative situations.

In many collaborative virtual reality applications, co-located users often have their relative position in the virtual environment matching the one in the real world. The resulting spatial consistency facilitates the co-manipulation of shared tangible props and enables the users to have direct physical contact with each other. However, these applications usually exclude their individual virtual navigation capability, such as teleportation, as it may break the spatial configuration between the real and virtual world. As a result, the users can only explore the virtual environment of approximately similar size and shape compared to their physical workspace. Moreover, their individual tasks with unlimited virtual navigation capability, which often take part in a continuous workflow of a complex collaborative scenario, have to be removed due to this constraint. This work aims to help overcome these limits by allowing users to recover spatial consistency after individual teleportation in order to re-establish their position in the current context of the collaborative task. We use a virtual representation of the user’s shared physical workspace and develop two different techniques to position it in the virtual environment. The first technique allows one user to fully position the virtual workspace, and the second approach enables concurrent positioning by equally integrating the input from all the users. We compared these two techniques in a controlled experiment in a virtual assembly task. The results show that allowing two users to manipulate the workspace significantly reduced the time they spent negotiating the position of the future workspace. However, the inevitable conflicts in simultaneous co-manipulation were also a little confusing to them.

Establishing an effective collaboration between augmented-reality (AR) and remote desktop users is a challenge because collaborators do not share a common physical space and equipment. Yet, such asymmetrical collaboration configurations are common today for many design tasks, due to the geographical distance of people or unusual circumstances such as a lockdown. We conducted a first study to investigate trade-offs of three remote representations of an AR workspace: a fully virtual representation, a first-person view, and an external view. Building on our findings, we designed ARgus, a multi-view video-mediated communication system that combines these representations through interactive tools for navigation, previewing, pointing, and annotation. We report on a second user study that observed how 12 participants used ARgus to provide remote instructions for an AR furniture arrangement task. Participants extensively used its view transition tools, while the system reduced their reliance on verbal instructions.

Industrial design review is an iterative process which mainly relies on two steps involving many stakeholders: design discussion and CAD data adjustment. We investigate how a wall-sized display could be used to merge these two steps by allowing multidisciplinary collaborators to simultaneously generate and explore design alternatives. We designed ShapeCompare based on the feedback from a usability study. It enables multiple users to compute and distribute CAD data with touch interaction. To assess the benefit of the wall-sized display in such context, we ran a controlled experiment which aims to compare ShapeCompare with a visualization technique suitable for standard screens. The results show that pairs of participants performed a constraint solving task faster and used more deictic instructions with ShapeCompare. From these findings, we draw generic recommendations for collaborative exploration of alternatives.

Teleportation is a navigation technique widely used in virtual reality applications using head-mounted displays. Basic teleportation usually moves a user’s viewpoint to a new destination of the virtual environment without taking into account the physical space surrounding them. However, considering the user’s real workspace is crucial for preventing them from reaching its limits and thus managing direct access to multiple virtual objects. In this paper, we propose to display a virtual representation of the user’s real workspace before the teleportation, and compare manual and automatic techniques for positioning such a virtual workspace. For manual positioning, the user adjusts the position and orientation of their future virtual workspace. A first controlled experiment compared exocentric and egocentric manipulation techniques with different virtual workspace representations, including or not an avatar at the user’s future destination. Although exocentric and egocentric techniques result in a similar level of performance, representations with an avatar help the user to understand better how they will land after teleportation. For automatic positioning, the user selects their future virtual workspace among relevant options generated at runtime. A second controlled experiment shows that the manual technique selected from the first experiment and the automatic technique are more efficient than the basic teleportation. Besides, the manual technique seems to be more suitable for crowded scenes than the automatic one.

Remote collaboration across wall-sized displays creates a key challenge: how to support audio-video communication among users as they move in front of the display. We present CamRay, a platform that uses camera arrays embedded in wall-sized displays to capture video of users and present it on remote displays according to the users' positions. We investigate two settings: in Follow-Remote, the position of the video window follows the position of the remote user; in Follow-Local, the video window always appears in front of the local user. We report the results of a controlled experiment showing that with Follow-Remote, participants are faster, use more deictic instructions, interpret them more accurately, and use fewer words. However, some participants preferred the virtual face-to-face created by Follow-Local when checking for their partners' understanding. We conclude with design recommendations to support remote collaboration across wall-sized displays.

While multi-touch devices are well established in our everyday life, they are currently becoming larger and larger. Large screens such as wall-sized displays are now equipped with multi-touch capabilities. Multi-touch wall-sized displays will become widespread in a near future in various places such as public places or meeting rooms. These new devices are an interesting opportunity to interact with 3D virtual environments: the large display surface offers a good immersion, while the multi-touch capabilities could make interaction with 3D content accessible to the general public.

This paper presents a controlled experiment assessing the accuracy when interpreting remote users showing a shared object on a large wall-sized display, either by looking at it or by looking and pointing at it. We analyze both distance and angle errors and how they are sensitive to the relative position be- tween the remote viewer and the video feed. We show that the remote user can accurately determine the target, that eye gaze alone is more accurate than combined with the hand, and that the relative position between the viewer and the video feed has little effect on accuracy. These findings can inform the design of future telepresence systems for wall-sized displays.

In the context of scientific data analysis, we propose to compare a remote collaborative manipulation technique with a single user manipulation technique. The manipulation task consists in positioning a clipping plane in order to perform cross-sections of scientific data that show several points of interest located inside these data. For the remote collaborative manipulation, we have chosen to use the 3-hand manipulation technique proposed by Aguerreche et al., which is very suitable with a remote manipulation of a plane. We ran two experiments to compare the two manipulation techniques with some participants located in two different countries. These experiments has shown that the remote collaborative manipulation technique was significantly more efficient than the single user manipulation when the 3 points of interest were far apart inside the scientific data and, consequently, when the manipulation task was more difficult and required more precision. When the 3 points of interest were close together, there was not significant difference between the two manipulation techniques.

This demonstration introduces new ways for exploring Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) that contain 3D scientific data sets obtained by simulation. In order to make decisions accordingly to their collective knowledge and understanding of the simulation, the users must collaborate and share experiences and comments. We provide tools to enable a good coordination between the users, and to make each user aware of the activity of others. Each user can navigate within the CVE: change her own position, orientation and scale. Each user can also add annotations within the virtual universe. We propose several 3D layouts for the presentation of the data, associated with different 3D navigation tools. Consequently, the user can explore the data accoording to various parameters such as time or temperature. Last we propose a new 3D interaction tool, called 2D Cursor / 3D Pointer, dedicated to selection and manipulation of 3D objects, and application control. This 2D cursor is associated with a 3D geometry in order to make people aware of the activity of the users who are using this tool.