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1. Working Together Apart through Embodiment: Engaging in Everyday Collaborative Activities in Social Virtual Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3492836  

   Freeman, Guo; Acena, Dane; McNeese, Nathan J.; Schulenberg, Kelsea (January 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Computer-mediated collaboration has long been a core research interest in CSCW and HCI. As online social spaces continue to evolve towards more immersive and higher fidelity experiences, more research is still needed to investigate how emerging novel technology may foster and support new and more nuanced forms and experiences of collaboration in virtual environments. Using 30 interviews, this paper focuses on what people may collaborate on and how they collaborate in social Virtual Reality (VR). We broaden current studies on computer-mediated collaboration by highlighting the importance of embodiment for co-presence and communication, replicating offline collaborative activities, and supporting the seamless interplay of work, play, and mundane experiences in everyday lives for experiencing and conceptualizing collaboration in emerging virtual environments. We also propose potential design implications that could further support everyday collaborative activities in social VR 

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2. Immersive Distributed Design Through Real-Time Capture, Translation, and Rendering of Three-Dimensional Mesh Data1

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4035001  

   Lesniak, Kevin; Terpenny, Janis; Tucker, Conrad S.; Anumba, Chimay; Bilén, Sven G. (September 2017, Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering)

   With design teams becoming more distributed, the sharing and interpreting of complex data about design concepts/prototypes and environments have become increasingly challenging. The size and quality of data that can be captured and shared directly affects the ability of receivers of that data to collaborate and provide meaningful feedback. To mitigate these challenges, the authors of this work propose the real-time translation of physical objects into an immersive virtual reality environment using readily available red, green, blue, and depth (RGB-D) sensing systems and standard networking connections. The emergence of commercial, off-the-shelf RGB-D sensing systems, such as the Microsoft Kinect, has enabled the rapid three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of physical environments. The authors present a method that employs 3D mesh reconstruction algorithms and real-time rendering techniques to capture physical objects in the real world and represent their 3D reconstruction in an immersive virtual reality environment with which the user can then interact. Providing these features allows distributed design teams to share and interpret complex 3D data in a natural manner. The method reduces the processing requirements of the data capture system while enabling it to be portable. The method also provides an immersive environment in which designers can view and interpret the data remotely. A case study involving a commodity RGB-D sensor and multiple computers connected through standard TCP internet connections is presented to demonstrate the viability of the proposed method. 

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3. KonnectVR: Pioneering an Open-sourced, Educational, Collaborative Virtual Reality Platform

   Anderson, David C; Gill, Mark (March 2024, Journal of advanced technological education)

   Virtual reality (VR) technologies are transforming educational paradigms by enabling highly immersive, interactive simulations that increase engagement and cognition. This paper presents KonnectVR (KVR), an innovative, open-source platform designed to mitigate common barriers in educational VR. Barriers such as high costs, limited content customization, and the absence of real-time assessments. The system, constructed by undergraduate students, facilitates experiential learning, real-time collaboration, and assessment delivery, empowering educators with an unprecedented degree of accessibility and customization. Employing a case study methodology, we provide unique insider perspectives into KVR's architectural design, underlying pedagogical framework, development processes, challenges encountered, and future directions. Findings reveal technical hurdles overcome by undergraduate student teams like VR-specific programming, user interface design, networking, and cybersecurity integration. The analysis uncovers key themes around project-based skill acquisition, problem-solving perseverance, cross-team knowledge gaps, and the benefits of an agile, user-centric approach. Ultimately, KVR demonstrates how emerging technologies and open-sourced solutions can converge to innovate learning, pushing boundaries while serving an egalitarian educational mission. The platform sets the foundation for a new generation of community-driven tools democratizing access to interactive, distributive, collaborative VR experiences that maximize knowledge construction. 

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4. Measuring Human-Robot Team Benefits Under Time Pressure in a Virtual Reality Testbed

   Katarina Popovic, Millicent Schlafly (October 2023, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS))

   During a natural disaster such as hurricane, earth- quake, or fire, robots have the potential to explore vast areas and provide valuable aid in search & rescue efforts. These scenar- ios are often high-pressure and time-critical with dynamically- changing task goals. One limitation to these large scale deploy- ments is effective human-robot interaction. Prior work shows that collaboration between one human and one robot benefits from shared control. Here we evaluate the efficacy of shared control for human-swarm teaming in an immersive virtual reality environment. Although there are many human-swarm interaction paradigms, few are evaluated in high-pressure settings representative of their intended end use. We have developed an open-source virtual reality testbed for realistic evaluation of human-swarm teaming performance under pressure. We conduct a user study (n=16) comparing four human-swarm paradigms to a baseline condition with no robotic assistance. Shared control significantly reduces the number of instructions needed to operate the robots. While shared control leads to marginally improved team performance in experienced participants, novices perform best when the robots are fully autonomous. Our experimental results suggest that in immersive, high-pressure settings, the benefits of robotic assistance may depend on how the human and robots interact and the human operator’s expertise. 

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5. Panoptic Reconstruction of Immersive Virtual Soundscapes Using Human-Scale Panoramic Imagery with Visual Recognition

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.21785/icad2021.043  

   Huang, Mincong; Chabot, Samuel; Braasch, Jonas (January 2021, The 26th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2021))

   This work, situated at Rensselaer's Collaborative-Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment Laboratory (CRAIVELab), uses panoramic image datasets for spatial audio display. A system is developed for the room-centered immersive virtual reality facility to analyze panoramic images on a segment-by-segment basis, using pre-trained neural network models for semantic segmentation and object detection, thereby generating audio objects with respective spatial locations. These audio objects are then mapped with a series of synthetic and recorded audio datasets and populated within a spatial audio environment as virtual sound sources. The resulting audiovisual outcomes are then displayed using the facility's human-scale panoramic display, as well as the 128-channel loudspeaker array for wave field synthesis (WFS). Performance evaluation indicates effectiveness for real-time enhancements, with potentials for large-scale expansion and rapid deployment in dynamic immersive virtual environments. 

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