Giving the Audience a Perspective : Investigating the opportunities and challenges of introducing independent audience controlled cameras to a collaborative virtual environment

Abstract: In the current field of cooperation in Mixed Reality there is, at the timeof writing, a clear lack of research regarding the cooperation between animmersed Virtual Reality user and a non-immersed audience. Therefore, theimpact of adding audience-controlled cameras to the two parties’ cooperationwas investigated. This was done through a user study where the participantswere cooperating as a Virtual Reality user and an audience to find hiddenobjects. The study was conducted with two prototypes. In the first prototype,the audience was only able to see a mirrored view of the immersed user. Inthe second, independent smartphone-controlled cameras were added to thedisposal of the audience. The results of the user study indicate that the secondprototype was overall less practical than the first in effectiveness, efficiencyand satisfaction. However, in certain scenarios where the number of objectswithin a scene made verbal communication inefficient, the second prototypeprevailed, indicating its potential in more visually complex scenes.