Virtual teleportation into real spaces via digital avatars for remote collaborative design

Abstract: Market globalization and the rapid evolution of customer requirements highly influence how the product design process must be performed. It is becoming increasingly important to consider usability, functionality, and visual harmony of products to be designed in the early design phases. Collaborative design in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) is a promising approach to enhancing the flexible cooperation of a geographically distributed design team. New ICT technologies have recently emerged that allow creating IVEs to facilitate synchronous and remote design review activities through easy interaction and data sharing among all participants. A virtual environment provides an immersive space where virtual actors (avatars) reproduce team members to achieve high presence, real-time communication, and remote collaboration. Though several collaborative software applications based on virtual reality (VR) technique have been developed to connect people and share design information in an IVE, in most cases, the artificial 3D environments do not represent real spaces. Basically, existing VR-based applications focus on inspection and modelling functions for analyzing target products thoroughly (i.e., rotate and manipulate CAD models, zoom, measure specific model items, add or delete some parts) based on 3D-CAD platforms. This study focuses on synchronous and remote design review meetings in a real space where a target product is installed and used. The technical review processes require tele-communication and mutual view sharing among remote reviewers and local collaborators. Examples include remote inspection for public infrastructure, superposition of a design concept over a real building for renovation, and remote machinery maintenance instruction. To improve a user’s perception of “being present in another real space,” the concept of virtual teleportation is introduced. This is a tele-conferencing and space sharing technology in which participants can remotely work together as if they were in the shared real space during communication. This paper proposes a simplified virtual teleportation system for the extemporary sharing of a real space and industrial products to be reviewed. This system combines augmented reality (AR) and VR to provide an IVE that enables reviewers in different geographic locations to communicate with other collaborators at a local site through their digital avatars. The users will feel as if they are looking, talking and meeting with each other face to face through their digital avatars in the real place. The system setup supports the remote evaluation of product design installed in a real space from the viewpoint and viewing angle of the avatars. Instead of performing real-time 3D reconstruction of the scene, the proposed system constructs a static IVE from panoramic images of the local site. This approach is simpler but still preserves the visible detail of the real space and the target equipment.

Keywords: Digital avatar, Collaborative design, Virtual teleportation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006009

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