A project in collaboration with:

the-hongkong-university-of-science-and-technology

Publication

S. Thanyadit, P. Punpongsanon, and T. Chuen Pong.
ObserVAR: Visualization System for Observing Virtual Reality Users
using Augmented Reality
IEEE ISMAR ’19.

DOI     Paper     Video    

Slides

2019-ismar-observar-Slide1 2019-ismar-observar-Slide2 2019-ismar-observar-Slide3 2019-ismar-observar-Slide4 2019-ismar-observar-Slide5 2019-ismar-observar-Slide6 2019-ismar-observar-Slide7 2019-ismar-observar-Slide8 2019-ismar-observar-Slide9 2019-ismar-observar-Slide10 2019-ismar-observar-Slide11 2019-ismar-observar-Slide12 2019-ismar-observar-Slide13 2019-ismar-observar-Slide14 2019-ismar-observar-Slide15 2019-ismar-observar-Slide16 2019-ismar-observar-Slide17 2019-ismar-observar-Slide18 2019-ismar-observar-Slide19 2019-ismar-observar-Slide20 2019-ismar-observar-Slide21 2019-ismar-observar-Slide22 2019-ismar-observar-Slide23 2019-ismar-observar-Slide24 2019-ismar-observar-Slide25 2019-ismar-observar-Slide26 2019-ismar-observar-Slide27 2019-ismar-observar-Slide28 2019-ismar-observar-Slide29 2019-ismar-observar-Slide30 2019-ismar-observar-Slide31 2019-ismar-observar-Slide32 2019-ismar-observar-Slide33 2019-ismar-observar-Slide34 2019-ismar-observar-Slide35 2019-ismar-observar-Slide36 2019-ismar-observar-Slide37 2019-ismar-observar-Slide38 2019-ismar-observar-Slide39 2019-ismar-observar-Slide40 2019-ismar-observar-Slide41 2019-ismar-observar-Slide42 2019-ismar-observar-Slide43

ObserVAR: Visualization System
for Observing Virtual Reality Users using Augmented Reality





While virtual reality (VR) tools provide an immersive learning experience for students, it is difficult for an instructor to observe the students’ learning activities in a virtual environment (VE). Thus, it hinders interactions that could occur between the instructor and students, which are usually required in a classroom environment to understand how each student learns. Previous work has added virtual awareness cues that can help a small group of students to collaborate in a VE. However, when the number of students increases, such virtual awareness cues can cause visual clutter and confuse the instructor. We propose ObserVAR, a visualization system that allows the instructor to observe students in a VE at scale. ObserVAR uses augmented reality techniques to visualize each student’s gaze in a VE and improves the instructor’s awareness of the entire class. The visualizations are then optimized to reduce visual clutter in the scene using a force-directed graph drawing algorithm. In designing ObserVAR, we first investigated visualizations that can provide the instructor with an overall awareness of the VE that can be scaled up as the number of users increases. Second, we optimized the visualization of students by leveraging a graph drawing algorithm to reduce the visual clutter in the class scene. We compared the performance of our prototype with some commercially available user interfaces for VE classrooms. In our study, ObserVAR has demonstrated improvement and flexibility in several application scenarios.

overview-observar
Figure 1: Differences between an existing approach and ObserVAR in observing/guiding students in VEs. Existing approach uses an icon to represent each student. The instructor relies on the 2D monitor (image: Google For Education). In our approach, the avatars represent the students. The instructor uses augmented reality (AR) to observe and instruct each student.

To summarize, this paper makes the following contributions:
  • We introduce an AR visualization technique that can scale up with the number of students in the classroom, which improves the interactions between an instructor and a group of students in a VE classroom.
  • Through our user study, we determine classroom scenarios in which ObserVAR is suitable.
  • We alleviate the occlusion problem, which usually occurs in the scale of a classroom, using a graph drawing algorithm.

For more details, please find our paper.