ABSTRACT
Collaborative academia-industry development and evaluation of virtual reality (VR) systems is a mutually beneficial opportunity to investigate VR technology in a real context and conduct user studies with target users. However, such collaboration is rarely performed due to variations in project pace and work methods. In this article, we introduce the process of action research on joint design, development, and evaluation of a collaborative VR system to address industrial needs. The paper further presents employees' subjective opinions and perceived value of industrial VR applications and reflects on their involvement throughout the process. The article concludes with a process-oriented framework for remote academia-industry collaboration, supported with practical suggestions on how to support this collaboration. Our experiences reveal the methods and advantages of remote collaboration in all phases of the process and signify the efficiency of the remote framework for academia-industry collaboration, especially relevant in the light of the COVID-19 pandemia. © 2021 ACM.
ABSTRACT
More than 50 years since its mass market introduction the core user interfaces of Video Conferencing (VC) systems have essentially been unchanged. Relaying real time audio and video over distance is inherently productive. However, it lacks the sense of in-person interaction. With the current global pandemic, additional privacy concerns over the extended use of video and audio-conferencing systems, there is a need to redefine how VC Systems function and what information they communicate. To resolve these issues, we propose a VC system that utilizes facial recognition to identify and catalog participant’s expressions and communicates their emotional states to other participants on the VC system using encoded haptic cues. In our testing we found that the approach was able to provide summarized haptic feedback of facial expressions and reduce the time it took for the participants to react to ongoing discussions without increasing mental or physical strain on the user. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.