Tele-Immersion : Virtual Reality based Collaboration

The 'perception of being present in another space' duringvideo teleconferencing is a challenging task. This work makes an effortto improve upon a user perception of being 'present' in another space byemploying a virtual reality (VR) headset and an embodied telepresencesystem (ETS). In our application scenario, a remote participant usesa VR headset to collaborate with local collaborators. At a local site,an ETS is used as a physical representation of the remote participantamong his/her local collaborators. The head movements of the remoteperson is mapped and presented by the ETS along with audio-video com-munication. Key considerations of complete design are discussed, wheresolutions to challenges related to head tracking, audio-video communi-cation and data communication are presented. The proposed approachis validated by the user study where quantitative analysis is done onimmersion and presence parameters