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Christian Mai, Sarah Aragon Bartsch, Lea Rieger
Evaluating Shared Surfaces for Co-Located Mixed-Presence Collaboration
In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM '18) (bib)

When wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) in everyday environments, interactions with real world bystanders often fail due to the visual barrier. As a result, the HMD user takes off the headset, which ends the virtual reality (VR) experience. We address this problem by providing a shared surface with the same content for both users, which is located at the same physical position in the real and the virtual world. In a between-subject user study (N=40), we investigate the effects of a shared surface for short-term collaboration in co-located mixed-presence scenarios. We compare (a) real-world collaboration, (b) having a shared surface only and (c) combining the shared surface with an avatar representation of the real world user in VR. We could show that shared surfaces are helpful for mixed-presence collaboration. Adding an avatar in VR improves performance measures such as task-completion time, error rate and number of clarifying questions. To support future work in this field, we finally propose design implications and research directions.