Projects: ETLTC-ICETM, Aizu-Wakamatsu

My first paper with the new lab is titled: Colocation of physical avatars: Prototyping a common ground.  The conference was held in the beautiful town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, under deep snow. 

The abstract is as follows:

Commercialisation and widespread adoption of Mixed Reality (MR) technologies have ushered in a new era of communication, with groundbreaking trends such as metaverse, telepresence, and mixed reality reshaping the way we connect. These trends are enabling and facilitating avatar-based interactions in virtual environments. However, there is still a significant challenge to be addressed: the seamless transition from the digital realm back into the physical world. How can individuals effectively meet, communicate, collaborate, and learn together with others who are physically remote? This is where the Common Ground can be found, a suite of real-time technologies enabling a mutual understanding and shared learning experience between humans, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the physical environments they share.

The objective of Common Ground is to find a mutual understanding between physical and digital realms, ultimately converging into a single and unified infrastructure that is parsable, representable, and comprehensible by current technology. This is achieved through establishing a common semantics package or middleware that connects sensors, the physical environment, and a human’s actions within those environments. Acting as an intermediary, Game Engines can facilitate the transfer of a human via the virtual realm, co-locating physical activities into a shared Mixed Reality space.

This paper introduces the Common Ground concept and key terms, as well as highlighting its unique capabilities and considers how it can support communication through shared experiences. This paper focuses on avatar capture and realisation, establishing the broad challenges that must be addressed. A pilot implementation is presented in contrast to these challenges, identifying specific future work that must be done if the Common Ground concept is to be fully realised.