Virtual Family Room: Bridging the Long Distance

The fast-paced nature of the modern world and opportunities in far-flung locations, especially due to military deployment, will invariably lead to long episodes of separation between family members. It is imperative that we use VR to mitigate the effects of such separations, particularly for young families and families with young children who are in their developmental phases. This poses unique challenges. First, the participants are of different ages and have differing levels of experience in virtual reality and secondly, the environment needs to be customizable and unique from family to family. Here, we describe our efforts to design the Virtual Family Room (VFR) which is a customizable and persistent virtual environment that offers an authentic distance parental and bonding tool. The vision of the virtual family room is that it will grow into a framework for many environments that seek to naturally emulate the day to day interactions between people in different settings. The ease of set-up and mobility of the system are particularly desirable.