Jacob Tärning

Giving the Audience a Perspective:

Investigating the opportunities and challenges of introducing independent audience controlled cameras to a collaborative virtual environment

Abstract

In the current field of cooperation in Mixed Reality there is, at the time of writing, a clear lack of research regarding the cooperation between an immersed Virtual Reality user and a non-immersed audience. Therefore, the impact of adding audience-controlled cameras to the two parties' cooperation was investigated. This was done through a user study where the participants were cooperating as a Virtual Reality user and an audience to find hidden objects. The study was conducted with two prototypes. In the first prototype, the audience was only able to see a mirrored view of the immersed user. In the second, independent smartphone-controlled cameras were added to the disposal of the audience. The results of the user study indicate that the second prototype was overall less practical than the first in effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. However, in certain scenarios where the number of objects within a scene made verbal communication inefficient, the second prototype prevailed, indicating its potential in more visually complex scenes.