HyPhIVE: A Hybrid Virtual-Physical Collaboration Environment

Virtual world conferences have been shown to give users an increased sense of presence in a collaboration as opposed to teleconferences, video-conferences and web-conferences. Such telepresence encourages remote participants to engage in the collaboration. Current virtual world collaboration applications rely on mouse/keyboard interfaces to create pure-virtual collaborations. In this paper we propose HyPhIVE, a system to address hybrid collaboration between the physical world and virtual worlds. In hybrid collaboration scenarios, a group of people collaborate in the real world and others join them remotely via a virtual world. HyPhIVE uses non-intrusive mobile sensors to detect real world users´ collaboration context such as their position, direction of gaze, gestures and voice. HyPhIVE projects the sensed real world collaboration into a virtual world in a way that collaboration patterns are preserved. Remote users join the collaboration using virtual world clients and interact with other users´ avatars. User studies have shown that HyPhIVE effectively projects real world collaborations into a virtual world and it improves users´ experience of remote collaboration.