Publications

Group navigation techniques should be comprehensible for both the guide and the attendees, assist the group in avoiding collisions with obstacles, and allow the creation of meaningful spatial arrangements with respect to objects of interest. To meet these requirements, we developed a group navigation technique based on short-distance teleportation and evaluated it in an initial user study.

We review the different facets, the resulting challenges, and previous implementations of group navigation techniques in the literature and derive four broad and non-exclusive topic areas for future research on the subject. Our overarching goal is to underline the importance of optimizing navigation processes for groups and to increase the awareness of group navigation techniques as a relevant solution approach in this regard.

We present a novel collaborative virtual reality system that offers multiple immersive 3D views at large 3D scenes. The physical setup consists of two synchronized multi-user 3D displays - a tabletop and a large vertical projection screen. Our developments enable seamless 3D interaction across these independent 3D views.

We analyzed the design space of group navigation tasks in distributed virtual environments and present a framework consisting of techniques to form groups, distribute responsibilities, navigate together, and eventually split up again. To improve joint navigation, our work focused on an extension of the Multi-Ray Jumping technique that allows adjusting the spatial formation of two distributed users as part of the target specification process.

We illustrate the inherent challenges of applying the SSQ in virtual reality research and highlight large differences that can be found in related work. Based on our observations, we conclude by providing suggestions on how to improve the expressiveness of SSQ results in future studies and encourage researchers to consider simpler measurement methods if their research questions allow.

Multiple collocated HTC Vive setups sharing the same base stations and room calibration files still track their devices in different coordinate systems. We present a procedure for mapping the tracking data of multiple users to a common coordinate system and show that it enables spatially consistent interactions of collocated collaborators.

In this paper, we focus on the design and evaluation of short-range teleportation techniques (jumping) for a group of collocated users wearing head-mounted displays. We formulate the requirements for comprehensible group jumping and propose a novel Multi-Ray Jumping technique for the joint travel of collocated dyads.

We present the collaborative Virtual Reality Neurorobotics Lab, which allows multiple collocated and remote users to experience, discuss and participate in neurorobotic experiments in immersive virtual reality.

In this paper, we present a formal description and classification scheme for teleportation techniques and its application to the classification of jumping, a range-restricted variant of teleportation for exploring virtual environments. In addition, we demonstrate the results of a user study that compared jumping to the more conventional steering regarding spatial updating and simulator sickness.

This thesis describes navigation by jumping, a range-restricted variant of teleportation commonly implemented in modern VR applications. It illustrates the design space of jumping techniques and evaluates them with respect to spatial orientation performance and simulator sickness. The results indicate that jumping is a viable alternative to steering.

We present ShakeCast, a system for automatic peer-to-peer exchange of contact information between two persons who just shook hands. The accelerometer in a smartwatch is used to detect the physical handshake and implicitly triggers a setup-free information transfer between the users' personal smartphones using Bluetooth LE broadcasts.

The goal of this thesis is to extend previous research by investigating spatial awareness in immersive Virtual Reality when using active, user-initiated jumping techniques in comparison to the one obtained by traditional steering. For this purpose, the thesis explores spatial awareness on different fidelity levels, thereby focusing on the measure of spatial updating for its quantification.

In this paper, we present the Massive Mobile Multiuser (M³) framework, a software platform designed to enable setup-free, real-time, concurrent interaction with shared public displays through large numbers of personal mobile devices. M³ enables immediate interaction through the mobile browser without requiring prior setup on the user side and real-time interaction suitable for fast multiplayer games.

We present a live demonstration of the Massive Mobile Multiuser (M³) framework at the example of a public game which has already been shown to support up to 17 concurrent users. Despite a resource-constrained environment and an unpredictable selection of client devices, M³ consistently delivers performance suitable for real-time interaction.

Ziel dieser Bachelorarbeit ist es, eine konfigurierbare und generische Applikationsinfrastruktur für Multi-Display-Umgebungen im Kontext der Virtuellen Realität zu schaffen. Neben Kriterien der technischen Realisierbarkeit werden dafür zwei Implementierungsstrategien aufgezeigt. Beide Implementierungsstrategien werden hinsichtlich ihrer Machbarkeit bezüglich eines definierten Anforderungskatalogs diskutiert.