LiveSphere: Sharing the Surrounding Visual Environment for Immersive Experience in Remote Collaboration

Author

Nagai, Shohei and Kasahara, Shunichi and Rekimoto, Jun

Abstract

Sharing an immersive experience enhances situational awareness, enabling effective collaboration between persons in different places. The development of a head-worn camera enables us to capture the first-person view and share it as the personal experience. However, the limited viewing angle of such cameras prevents a remote viewer from obtaining a complete surrounding situation. In this paper, we propose a system called LiveSphere, which presents the entire surrounding visual environment using a head-worn system with multiple cameras. The image-stabilizing algorithm compensates image motion caused by the wearer's head movement. This enables the remote viewer to look around the environment independently from the wearer's head direction. We developed a prototype to examine how sharing the surrounding visual environment improves collaboration between persons in different places.