Proposition of VR-MR Hybrid System for Sharing Living-in-Room

Due to the rapid development of the Internet, it became easy to hold a teleconference. However, even in current teleconference systems, it is difficult for attendees of teleconference to share a feeling that they are at common space. On the other hand, even though a mode of transportation is quite developed, it is still hard to move so long distance for attending a conference every time. These situations indicate one needs, that is, new teleconference system by which the attendee can feel that they are existing at the same room. So, in this paper, we will propose a new framework to make a teleconference system for sharing living-in-room by using VR technology. In our system, we use Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. A user using an MR device recognizes another user at a remote place as an avatar, and a user using a VR device experiences a video of a remote place as a virtual space. As described above, each user experiences a sense as if they are in the same space. In addition, this feeling is called "feeling of sharing living-in-room" in our study. We conducted experiments on the proposed system. We divided the VR-side user and the MR-side user into the separate condition and evaluated it in terms of the feeling of sharing living-in-room users got. As a result, we showed that the VR-side user was effective in getting the feeling of sharing living-in-room by moving the viewpoint. The presence of avatars is currently implemented in the system was not effective for fostering the feeling of sharing living-in-room, and from this result, we found several points of the system for improvement related to avatars.