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Virtual Workspace Positioning Techniques during Teleportation for Co-located Collaboration in Virtual Reality using HMDs

In many collaborative virtual reality applications, co-located users often have their relative position in the virtual environment matching the one in the real world. The resulting spatial consistency facilitates the co-manipulation of shared tangible props and enables the users to have direct physical contact with each other. However, these applications usually exclude their individual virtual navigation capability, such as teleportation, as it may break the spatial configuration between the real and virtual world. As a result, the users can only explore the virtual environment of approximately similar size and shape compared to their physical workspace. Moreover, their individual tasks with unlimited virtual navigation capability, which often take part in a continuous workflow of a complex collaborative scenario, have to be removed due to this constraint. This work aims to help overcome these limits by allowing users to recover spatial consistency after individual teleportation in order to re-establish their position in the current context of the collaborative task. We use a virtual representation of the user’s shared physical workspace and develop two different techniques to position it in the virtual environment. The first technique allows one user to fully position the virtual workspace, and the second approach enables concurrent positioning by equally integrating the input from all the users. We compared these two techniques in a controlled experiment in a virtual assembly task. The results show that allowing two users to manipulate the workspace significantly reduced the time they spent negotiating the position of the future workspace. However, the inevitable conflicts in simultaneous co-manipulation were also a little confusing to them.