Shadow-Avatars: A Visualization Method to Avoid Collisions of Physically Co-Located Users in Room-Scale VR

In a typical living room scenrario, the physical space might be shared by multiple virtual reality (VR) users. Although, they might collabo- rate in the same virtual environment, their physical spatial relations, i. e., distances and orientations between users in the physical world, might vary from their virtual spatial relations, i. e., distances and orientations between them in the virtual world. When physical and virtual spatial relations are not consistent anymore, collisions between users in the physical space could occur. However, the feed- back about the positions of physically co-located VR users should be effective if required, but not disturbing otherwise. For such situations, we suggest to use shadow-avatars, which provide a vi- sualization of the actual physical positions of co-located VR users to avoid collisions and accidents. For these shadow-avatars, we use a semi-transparent silhouette of a virtual human. We evaluated two different types of shadow-avatars in a user study and compared them with a baseline condition regarding presence, usability, and number of collisions. The results show that a continuously visible shadow-avatar is preferred by the users and a dynamically visible shadow-avatar generated significantly more collisions.

@InProceedings{LHS18,
  author       = "Langbehn, Eike and Harting, Eva and Steinicke, Frank",
  title        = "Shadow-Avatars: A Visualization Method to Avoid Collisions of Physically Co-Located Users in Room-Scale VR",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Everyday Virtual Reality (WEVR)",
  year         = "2018",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2018/LHS18"
}