Visual Guidance for Remote Interaction in Avatar-Mediated Mixed-Reality Telepresence

Rapid advances in technology gradually realize immersive mixed-reality telepresence between distant spaces. In this paper, we present a novel visual guidance method to support interaction between remote users in an MR telepresence environment. Representing the spatial relationship between the user/avatar and interaction targets with angle-based interaction features, we assign recommendation scores of possible local placements as similarities between the interaction features of optimal remote pairs. The scores are visualized with 2D colored circular sectors. In addition, we overlap transparent virtual models of the remote space on the local space with respect to the shared interaction target for the users to better understand the recommendations. We examine whether the proposed score measure agrees with actual user perception on context preservation and find a score threshold for recommendation through user experiments in virtual reality. Another user study investigates the effectiveness of different combinations of visualizations and the degrees of perceptual overload of visual guides. A qualitative survey using a prototype MR telepresence system validates our visual guidance in the target scenario of MR remote collaboration.