Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visi... more Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visitors. This paper presents a study of a mixed reality system that allows web, virtual reality and physical visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. Our system allows visitors to share their location and orientation, communicate over a voice channel, and jointly navigate around a shared information space. Results from a study of 34 users of the system show that visiting with the system was highly interactive and retained many of the attractions of a traditional shared exhibition visit. Specifically, users could navigate together, collaborate around objects and discuss exhibits. These findings have implications for non-museum settings, in particular how location awareness is a powerful resource for collaboration, and how 'hybrid objects' can support collaboration at-a-distance.
In this paper we describe a system and infrastructure for sharing of visiting experiences across ... more In this paper we describe a system and infrastructure for sharing of visiting experiences across multiple media. The prototype system supports synchronous visiting by both physical and digital visitors, with digital access via either the World Wide Web or 3-dimensional graphics, and we are extending it to support asynchronous visiting in the form of annotations and recommendations.
Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual ci... more Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual city by runners located in the real world requires extensive orchestration work. An ethnographic study shows how this concerted achievement extends beyond the control room to the runners on the street. This, in turn, suggests the need to 'decentralize' orchestration and develop support for collaboration 'on the ground'. The study leads to design proposals for orchestration interfaces for mobile experiences that augment situational awareness and surreptitious monitoring among mobile participants and support troubleshooting in situations where participants are disconnected or are unable to access positioning systems such as GPS.
We present an investigation of selection strategies designed specifically for the spatially immer... more We present an investigation of selection strategies designed specifically for the spatially immersive display (SID), CAVE TM -like situation. We address two common contexts of use of SID displays: single user head tracked, and two person with one non-head tracked demonstrator and a visitor. This second context is, in our experience, a common use scenario of SIDs, but it, and other issues specific to SIDs, are largely ignored in the literature, which has concentrated on head-mounted displays. We introduce a novel interaction technique, Shadow Cone Selection, which was designed for the situation of non-head tracked interaction. Through analysis and experiment, we show that it might be preferred over standard cone and ray-based selection techniques for some applications.
This paper describes a study to assess the influence of a variety of factors on reported level of... more This paper describes a study to assess the influence of a variety of factors on reported level of presence in immersive virtual environments. It introduces the idea of "stacking depth", that is, where a participant can simulate the process of entering the virtual environment while already in such an environment, which can be repeated to several levels of depth. An experimental study including 24 subjects was carried out. Half of the subjects were transported between environments by using virtual Head-mounted displays, and the other half by going through doors. Three other binary factors were: whether or not gravity operated, whether or not the subject experienced a virtual precipice, and whether or not the subject was followed around by a virtual actor.
This paper describes a technique for walking through, and climbing or descending steps and ladder... more This paper describes a technique for walking through, and climbing or descending steps and ladders in virtual reality. The idea is that human participants in the virtual reality (VR) carry out a whole body gesture similar to walking, by walking in place. A pattern analyser distinguishes between walking in place behaviour, and any other behaviour, and moves the participant through the environment when it detects the walking in place. Such "walking" while on steps or ladders similarly causes appropriate virtual movement. We discuss this in the context of a paradigm for interaction called "body centred interaction". This attempts to maximise the match between the mental body model formed as a result of proprioceptive information generated by limb and body movements, and the sensory data displayed by the VR system, within the constraints imposed by limited tracking information. We argue that the sense of presence in the VR is enhanced by such body centred interaction techniques, and we present experimental evidence in support of this claim.
In this paper we present the results of a trial in which two participants collaborated on a puzzl... more In this paper we present the results of a trial in which two participants collaborated on a puzzle-solving task in networked virtual environments. The task was a Rubik's cube type puzzle, and this meant that the two participants had to interact with the space and with each other very intensivelyFand they did this successfully despite the limitation of the networked situation. We compare collaboration in networked immersive projection technology (IPT's) systems with previous results concerning collaboration in an IPT system linked with a desktop computer, and also with collaboration on the same task in the real world. Our findings show that the task performance in networked IPT's and in the real scenario are very similar to each otherFwhereas IPT-to-desktop performance is much poorer. Results about participants' experience of 'presence', 'co-presence' and collaboration shed further light on these findings. r
This paper describes a study of remote collaboration between people in a shared virtual environme... more This paper describes a study of remote collaboration between people in a shared virtual environment. Seventeen subjects were recruited at University College London, who worked with a confederate at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Each pair was required to negotiate the task of handling an object together, and moving a few metres into a building. The DIVE system was used throughout, and the network support was Internet-2. This was an observational study to examine the extent to which such collaboration was possible, to explore the limitations of DIVE within this context, and to examine the relationship between several variables such as co-presence and task performance. The results suggest that although the task is possible under this framework, it could only be achieved by various software tricks within the DIVE framework. A new Virtual Environment system is required that has better knowledge of network performance, and that supports shared object manipulation across a network. The participant-study suggests that co-presence, the sense of being together with another person, was significantly and positively correlated with task performance.
A study by indicated that naive subjects in an immersive virtual environment experience a higher ... more A study by indicated that naive subjects in an immersive virtual environment experience a higher subjective sense of presence when they locomote by walking-in-place (virtual walking) than when they push-button-fly (along the floor plane). We replicated their study, adding real walking as a third condition.
Three pairs of professional actors and a director each met in a shared non-immersive virtual real... more Three pairs of professional actors and a director each met in a shared non-immersive virtual reality system over a two-week period to rehearse a short play. The actors and director never met one another physically until a short time before a live rehearsal in front of an audience. The actors were represented by avatars which could be controlled to make a range of facial expressions, and some body movements, including navigation through the space. The study examined the extent to which virtual reality could be used by the actors and director to rehearse their later live performance. Four indicators captured by questionnaires show that over the period of the four days their sense of presence in the virtual rehearsal space, their co-presence with the other actor, and their degree of cooperation all increased. Moreover their evaluation of the extent to which the virtual rehearsal was similar to a real rehearsal also increased. Debriefing sessions with the actors and director are reported, which suggest that a performance level was reached in the virtual rehearsal which formed the basis of a successful live performance, one that could not have been achieved by learning of lines or video conferencing.
This paper describes a new measure for presence in immersive virtual environments (VEs) that is b... more This paper describes a new measure for presence in immersive virtual environments (VEs) that is based on data that can be unobtrusively obtained during the course of a VE experience. At different times during an experience, a participant will occasionally switch between interpreting the totality of sensory inputs as forming the VE or the real world. The number of transitions from virtual to real is counted, and, using some simplifying assumptions, a probabilistic Markov chain model can be constructed to model these transitions. This model can be used to estimate the equilibrium probability of being ''present'' in the VE. This technique was applied in the context of an experiment to assess the relationship between presence and body movement in an immersive VE. The movement was that required by subjects to reach out and touch successive pieces on a three-dimensional chess board. The experiment included twenty subjects, ten of whom had to reach out to touch the chess pieces (the active group) and ten of whom only had to click a handheld mouse button (the control group). The results revealed a signi cant positive association in the active group between body movement and presence. The results lend support to interaction paradigms that are based on maximizing the match between sensory data and proprioception.
We have developed software bots that inhabit the popular online social environment SecondLife (SL... more We have developed software bots that inhabit the popular online social environment SecondLife (SL). Our bots can wander around, collect data, engage in simple interactions, and carry out simple automated experiments. In this paper we use our bots to study spatial social behavior. We found an indication that SL users display distinct spatial behavior when interacting with other users. In addition, in an automated experiment carried out by our bot, we found that users, when their avatars were approached by our bot, tended to respond by moving their avatar, further indicating the significance of proxemics in SL.
The Drift Table is an electronic coffee table that displays slowly moving aerial photography cont... more The Drift Table is an electronic coffee table that displays slowly moving aerial photography controlled by the distribution of weight on its surface. It was designed to investigate our ideas about how technologies for the home could support ludic activities-that is, activities motivated by curiosity, exploration, and reflection rather than externallydefined tasks. The many design choices we made, for example to block or disguise utilitarian functionality, helped to articulate our emerging understanding of ludic design. Observations of the Drift Table being used in volunteers' homes over several weeks gave greater insight into how playful exploration is practically achieved and the issues involved in designing for ludic engagement.
ACM Transactions on Computer-human Interaction, 2005
Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desire... more Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desired. Expected movements are those that users naturally perform; sensed are those that can be measured by a computer; and desired movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of expected, sensed, and desired movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds; the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; and the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs. We propose that this approach can help to build a bridge between the analytic and inspirational approaches to design and can help designers meet
The effects of available visual information in the periphery (enlargement of the functional visua... more The effects of available visual information in the periphery (enlargement of the functional visual field) on performance in navigation were evaluated in an experimental setup searching for a ''compromise'' between desktop and head-immersion situations. A Fixed Vision condition (fixed display) and two Mobile Vision conditions (head-tracking with a visual field of variable width) were compared in six virtual environments of different complexity and in four successive sessions. First, a global improvement in performance throughout the sessions revealed a gradual integration of the properties of the simulation device. Second, performance was higher in the Mobile Vision conditions, as shown by the smoothness of the subjects' paths (sharp curves could be negotiated without stopping), indicating the importance of a wide functional visual field. In conclusion, the need to design realistic and functionaly efficient human-machine interfaces for navigation is discussed.
This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of body movements on presence in a vir... more This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of body movements on presence in a virtual environment. Twenty subjects were required to walk through a virtual field of trees and count the number of trees with diseased leaves. A 2?2 between-subjects design was used to assess the influence of two factors on presence. One factor was tree height variation, and a second factor was the complexity of the task. The field with greater variation in tree height required subjects to bend down and look up more than those in the lower variation tree height field. Those with the higher complexity task were told to remember the distribution of diseased trees in the field, as well as to count them. The results showed a significant positive association between reported presence and the amount of body movement, in particular head yaw, and the extent to which subjects bent down and stood up. There was also a strong interaction effect between the task complexity and gender, with females in the group with the more complex task reporting a much lower sense of presence than in the simpler task.
What happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer genera... more What happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer generated-to an audience of avatars? If the virtual audience seems attentive, well-behaved, and interested, if they show positive facial expressions with complimentary actions such as clapping and nodding, does the speaker infer correspondingly positive evaluations of performance and show fewer signs of anxiety? On the other hand, if the audience seems hostile, disinterested, and visibly bored, if they have negative facial expressions and exhibit reactions such as head-shaking, loud yawning, turning away, falling asleep, and walking out, does the speaker infer correspondingly negative evaluations of performance and show more signs of anxiety? We set out to study this question during the summer of 1998. We designed a virtual public speaking scenario, followed by an experimental study. We wanted mainly to explore the effectiveness of virtual environments (VEs) in psychotherapy for social phobias. Rather than plunge straight in and design a virtual reality therapy tool, we first tackled the question of whether real people's emotional responses are appropriate to the behavior of the virtual people with whom they may interact. The project used DIVE (Distributive Interactive Virtual Environment) as the basis for constructing a working prototype of a virtual public speaking simulation. We constructed as a Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) model, a virtual seminar room that matched the actual seminar room in which subjects completed their various questionnaires and met with the experimenters
Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visi... more Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visitors. This paper presents a study of a mixed reality system that allows web, virtual reality and physical visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. Our system allows visitors to share their location and orientation, communicate over a voice channel, and jointly navigate around a shared information space. Results from a study of 34 users of the system show that visiting with the system was highly interactive and retained many of the attractions of a traditional shared exhibition visit. Specifically, users could navigate together, collaborate around objects and discuss exhibits. These findings have implications for non-museum settings, in particular how location awareness is a powerful resource for collaboration, and how 'hybrid objects' can support collaboration at-a-distance.
In this paper we describe a system and infrastructure for sharing of visiting experiences across ... more In this paper we describe a system and infrastructure for sharing of visiting experiences across multiple media. The prototype system supports synchronous visiting by both physical and digital visitors, with digital access via either the World Wide Web or 3-dimensional graphics, and we are extending it to support asynchronous visiting in the form of annotations and recommendations.
Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual ci... more Successfully staging a mixed reality game in which online players are chased through a virtual city by runners located in the real world requires extensive orchestration work. An ethnographic study shows how this concerted achievement extends beyond the control room to the runners on the street. This, in turn, suggests the need to 'decentralize' orchestration and develop support for collaboration 'on the ground'. The study leads to design proposals for orchestration interfaces for mobile experiences that augment situational awareness and surreptitious monitoring among mobile participants and support troubleshooting in situations where participants are disconnected or are unable to access positioning systems such as GPS.
We present an investigation of selection strategies designed specifically for the spatially immer... more We present an investigation of selection strategies designed specifically for the spatially immersive display (SID), CAVE TM -like situation. We address two common contexts of use of SID displays: single user head tracked, and two person with one non-head tracked demonstrator and a visitor. This second context is, in our experience, a common use scenario of SIDs, but it, and other issues specific to SIDs, are largely ignored in the literature, which has concentrated on head-mounted displays. We introduce a novel interaction technique, Shadow Cone Selection, which was designed for the situation of non-head tracked interaction. Through analysis and experiment, we show that it might be preferred over standard cone and ray-based selection techniques for some applications.
This paper describes a study to assess the influence of a variety of factors on reported level of... more This paper describes a study to assess the influence of a variety of factors on reported level of presence in immersive virtual environments. It introduces the idea of "stacking depth", that is, where a participant can simulate the process of entering the virtual environment while already in such an environment, which can be repeated to several levels of depth. An experimental study including 24 subjects was carried out. Half of the subjects were transported between environments by using virtual Head-mounted displays, and the other half by going through doors. Three other binary factors were: whether or not gravity operated, whether or not the subject experienced a virtual precipice, and whether or not the subject was followed around by a virtual actor.
This paper describes a technique for walking through, and climbing or descending steps and ladder... more This paper describes a technique for walking through, and climbing or descending steps and ladders in virtual reality. The idea is that human participants in the virtual reality (VR) carry out a whole body gesture similar to walking, by walking in place. A pattern analyser distinguishes between walking in place behaviour, and any other behaviour, and moves the participant through the environment when it detects the walking in place. Such "walking" while on steps or ladders similarly causes appropriate virtual movement. We discuss this in the context of a paradigm for interaction called "body centred interaction". This attempts to maximise the match between the mental body model formed as a result of proprioceptive information generated by limb and body movements, and the sensory data displayed by the VR system, within the constraints imposed by limited tracking information. We argue that the sense of presence in the VR is enhanced by such body centred interaction techniques, and we present experimental evidence in support of this claim.
In this paper we present the results of a trial in which two participants collaborated on a puzzl... more In this paper we present the results of a trial in which two participants collaborated on a puzzle-solving task in networked virtual environments. The task was a Rubik's cube type puzzle, and this meant that the two participants had to interact with the space and with each other very intensivelyFand they did this successfully despite the limitation of the networked situation. We compare collaboration in networked immersive projection technology (IPT's) systems with previous results concerning collaboration in an IPT system linked with a desktop computer, and also with collaboration on the same task in the real world. Our findings show that the task performance in networked IPT's and in the real scenario are very similar to each otherFwhereas IPT-to-desktop performance is much poorer. Results about participants' experience of 'presence', 'co-presence' and collaboration shed further light on these findings. r
This paper describes a study of remote collaboration between people in a shared virtual environme... more This paper describes a study of remote collaboration between people in a shared virtual environment. Seventeen subjects were recruited at University College London, who worked with a confederate at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Each pair was required to negotiate the task of handling an object together, and moving a few metres into a building. The DIVE system was used throughout, and the network support was Internet-2. This was an observational study to examine the extent to which such collaboration was possible, to explore the limitations of DIVE within this context, and to examine the relationship between several variables such as co-presence and task performance. The results suggest that although the task is possible under this framework, it could only be achieved by various software tricks within the DIVE framework. A new Virtual Environment system is required that has better knowledge of network performance, and that supports shared object manipulation across a network. The participant-study suggests that co-presence, the sense of being together with another person, was significantly and positively correlated with task performance.
A study by indicated that naive subjects in an immersive virtual environment experience a higher ... more A study by indicated that naive subjects in an immersive virtual environment experience a higher subjective sense of presence when they locomote by walking-in-place (virtual walking) than when they push-button-fly (along the floor plane). We replicated their study, adding real walking as a third condition.
Three pairs of professional actors and a director each met in a shared non-immersive virtual real... more Three pairs of professional actors and a director each met in a shared non-immersive virtual reality system over a two-week period to rehearse a short play. The actors and director never met one another physically until a short time before a live rehearsal in front of an audience. The actors were represented by avatars which could be controlled to make a range of facial expressions, and some body movements, including navigation through the space. The study examined the extent to which virtual reality could be used by the actors and director to rehearse their later live performance. Four indicators captured by questionnaires show that over the period of the four days their sense of presence in the virtual rehearsal space, their co-presence with the other actor, and their degree of cooperation all increased. Moreover their evaluation of the extent to which the virtual rehearsal was similar to a real rehearsal also increased. Debriefing sessions with the actors and director are reported, which suggest that a performance level was reached in the virtual rehearsal which formed the basis of a successful live performance, one that could not have been achieved by learning of lines or video conferencing.
This paper describes a new measure for presence in immersive virtual environments (VEs) that is b... more This paper describes a new measure for presence in immersive virtual environments (VEs) that is based on data that can be unobtrusively obtained during the course of a VE experience. At different times during an experience, a participant will occasionally switch between interpreting the totality of sensory inputs as forming the VE or the real world. The number of transitions from virtual to real is counted, and, using some simplifying assumptions, a probabilistic Markov chain model can be constructed to model these transitions. This model can be used to estimate the equilibrium probability of being ''present'' in the VE. This technique was applied in the context of an experiment to assess the relationship between presence and body movement in an immersive VE. The movement was that required by subjects to reach out and touch successive pieces on a three-dimensional chess board. The experiment included twenty subjects, ten of whom had to reach out to touch the chess pieces (the active group) and ten of whom only had to click a handheld mouse button (the control group). The results revealed a signi cant positive association in the active group between body movement and presence. The results lend support to interaction paradigms that are based on maximizing the match between sensory data and proprioception.
We have developed software bots that inhabit the popular online social environment SecondLife (SL... more We have developed software bots that inhabit the popular online social environment SecondLife (SL). Our bots can wander around, collect data, engage in simple interactions, and carry out simple automated experiments. In this paper we use our bots to study spatial social behavior. We found an indication that SL users display distinct spatial behavior when interacting with other users. In addition, in an automated experiment carried out by our bot, we found that users, when their avatars were approached by our bot, tended to respond by moving their avatar, further indicating the significance of proxemics in SL.
The Drift Table is an electronic coffee table that displays slowly moving aerial photography cont... more The Drift Table is an electronic coffee table that displays slowly moving aerial photography controlled by the distribution of weight on its surface. It was designed to investigate our ideas about how technologies for the home could support ludic activities-that is, activities motivated by curiosity, exploration, and reflection rather than externallydefined tasks. The many design choices we made, for example to block or disguise utilitarian functionality, helped to articulate our emerging understanding of ludic design. Observations of the Drift Table being used in volunteers' homes over several weeks gave greater insight into how playful exploration is practically achieved and the issues involved in designing for ludic engagement.
ACM Transactions on Computer-human Interaction, 2005
Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desire... more Movements of interfaces can be analyzed in terms of whether they are expected, sensed, and desired. Expected movements are those that users naturally perform; sensed are those that can be measured by a computer; and desired movements are those that are required by a given application. We show how a systematic comparison of expected, sensed, and desired movements, especially with regard to how they do not precisely overlap, can reveal potential problems with an interface and also inspire new features. We describe how this approach has been applied to the design of three interfaces: pointing flashlights at walls and posters in order to play sounds; the Augurscope II, a mobile augmented reality interface for outdoors; and the Drift Table, an item of furniture that uses load sensing to control the display of aerial photographs. We propose that this approach can help to build a bridge between the analytic and inspirational approaches to design and can help designers meet
The effects of available visual information in the periphery (enlargement of the functional visua... more The effects of available visual information in the periphery (enlargement of the functional visual field) on performance in navigation were evaluated in an experimental setup searching for a ''compromise'' between desktop and head-immersion situations. A Fixed Vision condition (fixed display) and two Mobile Vision conditions (head-tracking with a visual field of variable width) were compared in six virtual environments of different complexity and in four successive sessions. First, a global improvement in performance throughout the sessions revealed a gradual integration of the properties of the simulation device. Second, performance was higher in the Mobile Vision conditions, as shown by the smoothness of the subjects' paths (sharp curves could be negotiated without stopping), indicating the importance of a wide functional visual field. In conclusion, the need to design realistic and functionaly efficient human-machine interfaces for navigation is discussed.
This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of body movements on presence in a vir... more This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of body movements on presence in a virtual environment. Twenty subjects were required to walk through a virtual field of trees and count the number of trees with diseased leaves. A 2?2 between-subjects design was used to assess the influence of two factors on presence. One factor was tree height variation, and a second factor was the complexity of the task. The field with greater variation in tree height required subjects to bend down and look up more than those in the lower variation tree height field. Those with the higher complexity task were told to remember the distribution of diseased trees in the field, as well as to count them. The results showed a significant positive association between reported presence and the amount of body movement, in particular head yaw, and the extent to which subjects bent down and stood up. There was also a strong interaction effect between the task complexity and gender, with females in the group with the more complex task reporting a much lower sense of presence than in the simpler task.
What happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer genera... more What happens when someone talks in public to an audience they know to be entirely computer generated-to an audience of avatars? If the virtual audience seems attentive, well-behaved, and interested, if they show positive facial expressions with complimentary actions such as clapping and nodding, does the speaker infer correspondingly positive evaluations of performance and show fewer signs of anxiety? On the other hand, if the audience seems hostile, disinterested, and visibly bored, if they have negative facial expressions and exhibit reactions such as head-shaking, loud yawning, turning away, falling asleep, and walking out, does the speaker infer correspondingly negative evaluations of performance and show more signs of anxiety? We set out to study this question during the summer of 1998. We designed a virtual public speaking scenario, followed by an experimental study. We wanted mainly to explore the effectiveness of virtual environments (VEs) in psychotherapy for social phobias. Rather than plunge straight in and design a virtual reality therapy tool, we first tackled the question of whether real people's emotional responses are appropriate to the behavior of the virtual people with whom they may interact. The project used DIVE (Distributive Interactive Virtual Environment) as the basis for constructing a working prototype of a virtual public speaking simulation. We constructed as a Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) model, a virtual seminar room that matched the actual seminar room in which subjects completed their various questionnaires and met with the experimenters
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Papers by Anthony Steed