Collaborative Working - User Interaction ...

Extending usability of video conferences

• imagine a setup where you see the video of your conference participants as small images, each projected on a marker that you can move and place freely
• interaction
  • Imagine you want to pass a document to one or all participants:
    • register the object to a free marker
    • move this marker - to which the document is registered - to the markers that represent your participants to whom the document should be passed.
  • send the video stream of the camera mounted to your head instead the images facing you from front
    • so the other participants can see what you are seeing (WYSIWIS)
  • use markers for floor-passing
    • raise a marker to get queued
    • on the markers you see small numbers representing the position in the queue
• group awareness
  • in an ordinary video conference you are never aware where or at whom the people are looking
    • imagine now that you can detect for every participant at which marker he or she is looking
    • know you broadcast this information to all users and the video images are all rotated in the correct way, that they face the correct marker
    • this rotation must be done at every client because every participant can position the video marker where he/she wants to
  • use inertial sensors to track the rotation of the head without having a marker in your view
• you can also think of establishing a direct audio channel between two participants if they have direct eye contact.
• a possible extension would be speech recognition. Perhaps when a special marker is in view you can execute special commands like save or load by speech

Next Steps

• first prototype
  1. starting to build an application, where only avatars are rotating
  2. replace the avatars by pictures of the user
  3. show the video of the user instead of the picture
  • based on these three stages thinking of an user study to compare and evaluate these three versions
• here is some documentation of Services I implemented
  • CamViewerInterpreter
• and Documentation that I nedd for my own
  • SessionInterface

Emotional Group Awareness

• tracking the head movement and derive the emotional state of the person.
• in a conference you can use this information to visualize the agreement or disagreement in a group while someone is speaking

shared paper

• you have a conference with (locally distributed) participants
• imagine you have a sheet of paper with a marker printed in one corner.
• you can now write with a normal pen on the paper.
• the paper will be captured and your writings/drawings digitalised.
• then these information are send to all participants and projected on the sheet with the person specific color.
• projection could be realized with a projector or HMD

-- MichaelSiggelkow - 17 Oct 2004