SphereAvatar

Abstract

An emerging form of telecollaboration utilizes situated or mobile displays at a physical destination to virtually represent remote visitors. An example is a personal telepresence robot, which acts as a physical proxy for a remote visitor, and uses cameras and microphones to capture its surroundings, which are transmitted back to the visitor. We propose the use of spherical displays to represent telepresent visitors at a destination. We suggest that the use of such 360 degree displays in a telepresence system has two key advantages: it is possible to understand the identity of the visitor from any viewpoint; and with suitable graphical representation, it is possible to tell where the visitor is looking from any viewpoint. In this paper, we investigate how to optimally represent a visitor as an avatar on a spherical display by evaluating how varying representations are able to accurately convey head gaze.