We evaluate the ability of locally present participants to localize an avatar head's gaze direction in 360° hosted telepresence. We performed a controlled user study to test two potential solutions to indicate a remote user's gaze. We analyze the influence of the user's distance to the avatar and display technique on localization accuracy. Our experimental results suggest that all these factors have a significant effect on the localization accuracy with varying effect sizes.

We present a hybrid system combining immersive and non-immersive technology for traffic engineering experts in the cooperative process of construction site planning and decision-making. We exploit a four-sided CAVE setup, which allows a 360° view of the actual real-world location, while an interactive tabletop positioned in the center of the CAVE provides a map-based 2D planning view. By selecting different locations on the digital map, the 360° environment changes with respect to the selected spot. The tabletop can display more detailed data, e. g., traffic flow and traffic light programs. In the described setup group decisions can be made more effectively compared to current workplace situations. In preliminary focus group discussions, we received positive feedback and plan to expand the system's features in the future.

Telepresence systems have the potential to overcome limits and distance constraints of the real-world by enabling people to remotely visit and interact with each other. However, current telepresence systems usually lack natural ways of supporting interaction and exploration of remote environments (REs). In particular, single we-bcams for capturing the RE provide only a limited illusion of spatial presence and movement control of mobile platforms in today's telepresence systems are often restricted to simple interaction devices. One of the main challenges of telepresence systems is to allow users to explore a RE in an immersive, intuitive and natural way, e. g. real walking in the user's local environment (LE), and thus controlling motions of the robot platform in the RE. The goal of the presented research project is to meet these challenges, and contribute to the development and evaluation of novel telep-resence system and interactive behaviours in 360° virtual environments with a focus on full-view telepresence, spatial perception, locomotion, usability and motion sickness.

Telepresence systems have the potential to overcome limits and distance constraints of the real-world by enabling people to remotely visit and interact with each other. However, current telepresence systems usually lack natural ways of supporting interaction and exploration of remote environments (REs). In particular, single webcams for capturing the RE provide only a limited illusion of spatial presence, and movement control of mobile platforms in today's telepresence systems are often restricted to simple interaction devices. One of the main challenges of telepresence systems is to allow users to explore a RE in an immersive, intuitive and natural way, e.g., by real walking in the user's local environment (LE), and thus controlling motions of the robot platform in the RE. However, the LE in which the user's motions are tracked usually provides a much smaller interaction space than the RE. In this context, redirected walking (RDW) is a very suitable approach to solve this problem. However, so far there is no previous work, which explored if and how RDW can be used in video-based 360° telepresence systems. In this article, we conducted two psychophysical experiments in which we have quantified how much humans can be unknowingly redirected on virtual paths in the RE, which are different from the physical paths that they actually walk in the LE. Experiment 1 introduces a discrimination task between local and remote translations, and in Experiment 2 we analyzed the discrimination between local and remote rotations. In Experiment 1 participants performed straightforward translations in the LE that were mapped to straightforward translations in the RE shown as 360° videos, which were manipulated by different gains. Then, participants had to estimate if the remotely perceived translation was faster or slower than the actual physically performed translation. Similarly, in Experiment 2 participants performed rotations in the LE that were mapped to the virtual rotations in a 360° video-based RE to which we applied different gains. Again, participants had to estimate whether the remotely perceived rotation was smaller or larger than the actual physically performed rotation. Our results show that participants are not able to reliably discriminate the difference between physical motion in the LE and the virtual motion from the 360° video RE when virtual translations are down-scaled by 5.8% and up-scaled by 9.7%, and virtual rotations are about 12.3% less or 9.2% more than the corresponding physical rotations in the LE.

This work is observing the impacts/influence of different mapping functions between the user's flick gesture and the animation of the flicked object. The flick gesture, in which the user quickly swipes a finger across the screen and lifts the finger without slowing down, is a popular interaction technique on multitouch displays, e. g. for navigating on digital maps. While flick operations are well established on small mobile touch screens, the exact implementation of this technique on large multitouch tabletops needs to be adjusted to several parameters, especially flick velocity and inertia duration.