Looking Through Multi-View Windows Towards the Future of Remote Collaboration

There has been a growing number of workers who collaborate and are trained remotely. Oftentimes, especially in training scenarios, there exists one user who instructs the other users on how to complete tasks. In these scenarios, the instructor is commonly referred to as the remote expert, while the trainees are referred to as the local users. To properly instruct the local users, the remote expert must understand their perspectives. However, it is often more difficult for users to understand one another’s perspectives in remote collaboration than it is in face-to-face collaboration. To help the remote experts to understand the local user’s perspective, view-sharing is often utilized. Many techniques have been used for view-sharing in one-to-many remote collaboration, but the most common method is streaming a 2D view of the local users’ perspectives. In this study, we compared the traditional 2D version of view-sharing to a novel technique that utilizes virtual reality’s affordances of stereo rendering to create a 3D view-sharing window. We found that, while the 3D window may allow remote experts to better understand the local users’ perspectives, it also causes significantly more cybersickness than the traditional 2D method.