Redefining Teleconferencing with ViGather
Research News: Professor Christian Holz and his research group have developed a new teleconferencing system called ViGather. The System enables participants across all devices – VR/XR devices and traditional laptops, tablets, or PCs – to participate in immersive 3D meetings as avatars.
Virtual telepresence meetings are becoming increasingly prevalent in collaborative work environments, as they offer a convenient alternative to physical travel and complement remote work. Emerging Virtual and Mixed Reality systems increase the appeal of such meetings by rendering all participants spatially in 3D surrounding the user. However, these immersive systems are still rare compared to today’s standard mobile computing devices.
Professor Christian Holz and the postdocs Tiffany Luong and Christoph Gebhardt as well as doctoral students Huajian Qiu and Paul Streli of his research group have developed a new teleconferencing system called ViGather. The new system enables participants across emerging Virtual Reality (VR) or Extended Reality (XR) devices as well as traditional laptops, tablets, and PCs to participate in such immersive 3D meetings. ViGather represents all participants as avatars in the same 3D scene, regardless of the device they are using. This gives all participants a sense of being there and being together, offering a first-person perspective into the meeting and supporting non-verbal communication such as eye contact, body pose, or gestures to support communication – unlike existing telepresence systems that are in use today.
To provide teleconferencing users on traditional PCs with nearly the same experience, ViGather reconstructs each user’s pose, gaze, attention, and gestures using computer vision techniques that analyze the footage from the PC’s webcam. On VR/XR devices, ViGather leverages the powerful sensors in the headset to obtain the user’s gaze and gestures.
Via the spatial experience during the teleconference meeting, and by not showing users their own image, ViGather establishes a more natural and engaging conversation experience – without the undesirable side effect of so-called ‘Zoom fatigue’. Compared to existing teleconferencing systems, such as Zoom or Meta Horizon, participants in the user study evaluation reported a significantly higher sense of physical, spatial, and self-presence when using ViGather.
