Design for Collaboration in Mixed Reality: Technical Challenges and Solutions

One of the key challenges in the rapid technological advance of Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) concerns the design of collaborative experiences. VR systems do not readily support team collaboration because they tend to focus on individual experiences and do not easily facilitate naturalistic collaboration. MR environments provide solutions for collaborative experiences, but establishing smooth communication between hardware components and software modules faces a major hurdle. This paper presents the background to and main challenges of an ongoing project on collaboration in an MR lab, aiming to design a serious 'team collaboration' game. To this end, we utilized a common game engine to engineer a cost-effective solution that would make the game playable in a configuration operated by WorldViz and Volfoni equipment. Evaluation of various solutions in the development process found a Unity 3D Cluster Rendering Beta solution to be the most cost-effective and successful.

[1]  Matthew Chalmers,et al.  Lessons from the lighthouse: collaboration in a shared mixed reality system , 2003, CHI '03.

[2]  Ling Guan,et al.  An Approach to Ballet Dance Training through MS Kinect and Visualization in a CAVE Virtual Reality Environment , 2015, ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol..

[3]  H. J. G. Warmelink,et al.  A frame-reflective discourse analysis of serious games , 2016, Br. J. Educ. Technol..

[4]  Theo van Ruijven,et al.  Stealth Assessment of Teams in a Digital Game Environment , 2013, GALA.

[5]  Spencer W Parsons,et al.  To the Void , 2009 .

[6]  Andrew E. Johnson,et al.  Tele-Immersive Collaboration in the CAVE Research Network , 2001, Collaborative Virtual Environments.

[7]  Falko Kuester,et al.  The StarCAVE, a third-generation CAVE and virtual reality OptIPortal , 2009, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[8]  Aditi Majumder,et al.  Immersive full-surround multi-user system design , 2014, Comput. Graph..

[9]  P. Milgram,et al.  A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays , 1994 .

[10]  Ilona Heldal,et al.  The collaborative cube puzzle: a comparison of virtual and real environments , 2000, CVE '00.

[11]  Randolph L. Jackson,et al.  Collaboration and learning within immersive virtual reality , 2000, CVE '00.

[12]  Matthew Chalmers,et al.  Lessons from the lighthouse , 2003, CHI 2003.

[13]  Vid Petrovic,et al.  The future of the CAVE , 2011 .

[14]  Muhanna Muhanna,et al.  Virtual reality and the CAVE: Taxonomy, interaction challenges and research directions , 2015, J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci..

[15]  Daniel Mestre,et al.  User cohabitation in multi-stereoscopic immersive virtual environment for individual navigation tasks , 2015, 2015 IEEE Virtual Reality (VR).

[16]  Tomoo Inoue,et al.  Setting the best view of a virtual teacher in a mixed reality physical-task learning support system , 2013, J. Syst. Softw..