HyPhIVE : A Hybrid Virtual-Physical Collaboration Environment

Virtual world conferences have been shown to give users an increased sense of presence in a collaboration as opposed to teleconferences, video-conferences and web-conferences. Such telepresence encourages remote participants to engage in the collaboration. Current virtual world collaboration applications rely on mouse/keyboard interfaces to create pure-virtual collaborations. In this paper we propose HyPhIVE, a system to address hybrid collaboration between the physical world and virtual worlds. In hybrid collaboration scenarios, a group of people collaborate in the real world and others join them remotely via a virtual world. HyPhIVE uses non-intrusive mobile sensors to detect real world users' collaboration context such as their position, direction of gaze, gestures and voice. HyPhIVE projects the sensed real world collaboration into a virtual world in a way that collaboration patterns are preserved. Remote users join the collaboration using virtual world clients and interact with other users' avatars. User studies have shown that HyPhIVE effectively projects real world collaborations into a virtual world and it improves users' experience of remote collaboration.