Do You See What I See? Bring Live Pedestrians into an Outdoor Collaborative Mixed Reality Experience

Collaborative use of mixed reality (MR) devices is blurring the line between virtual and physical worlds. A remote virtual reality (VR) user immersed in a virtual replica of a real-world environment can interact in real-time with an augmented reality (AR) user who is physically present in that location. One challenge with such a setting is that the virtual world experienced by the remote users often lacks the richness of the real world, particularly in outdoor settings where dynamic elements, such as pedestrians, are missing. The first contribution of this paper is to report findings from focus group sessions on an example collaborative outdoor mixed reality system. Participants noted that lack of synchronisation between the AR and VR worlds diminishes the VR user's sense of having visited the real-world location together with the AR user. To address this, our second contribution is a system that brings live dynamics into a collaborative MR experience using pedestrians as an example. We conducted a user study using a tour-guide scenario, where an in-situ guide using AR interacts with a remote participant in VR. Results showed that in this scenario, most participants perceived the virtual avatars they saw as representations of real humans in situ.