ViRVIG study explores how to share a viewpoint in collaborative virtual reality

Researchers from the Research Center for Visualization, Virtual Reality and Graphics Interaction (ViRVIG) have published an article in Virtual Reality that analyses and evaluates different ways of sharing a viewpoint in a collaborative environment, simulating an anatomy class in virtual reality.

In collaborative VR classrooms, teachers often struggle to know whether students are seeing the same thing they are when pointing at a specific region of the virtual scene. The study compares commonly used techniques, such as teleportation and 2D views, with and without continuous streaming, and proposes a new one called Model Movement, in which the central 3D model moves instead of the user.

The team tested the techniques with 3D anatomical models in a user study with 32 participants, some local and some nominally remote. The results indicate that Model Movement was the preferred technique and appeared to be the most effective and usable for showing the region of interest.

The article, Seeing through others’ eyes in immersive VR: insights from a user study, is by Eva Monclús, Marta Fairén, Isabel Navazo and Pere-Pau Vázquez, and is now available in open access.

Read the full article: Seeing through others’ eyes in immersive VR: insights from a user study, Virtual Reality