Collaborative immersive workspace through a shared augmented environment Kiyoshi Kiyokawa 1 , Hidehiko Iwasa, Haruo Takemura, and Naokazu Yokoya Nara Institute of Science and Technology 8916-5, Takayama, Ikoma, Nara 630-0101, JAPAN ABSTRACT We focus on a shared augmented environment (SAE) as an almost ideal face-to-face collaborative virtual workspace. In an SAE, multiple users can observe both a virtual world and real partners through optical see-through head mounted displays (STHMDs). This paper describes two experiments for verifying the effectiveness of an SAE compared with a conventional shared virtual environment (SVE) and exploring improvement of them. Through the experiments, the effectiveness of an SAE compared with an SVE was confirmed. It was also confirmed that enhancement of the shared environment with computer graphics, i.e. displaying a partner’s body in an SVE, drawing a line as a partner’s viewing direction and emphasizing virtual objects to which a partner pay attention, improves workers’ feeling and collaboration efficiency. Keywords: collaboration, virtual reality, augmented reality, face-to-face interaction. 1. INTRODUCTION In the last decade, computers have been used for supporting not only desktop collaboration but also spatial collaboration using virtual reality techniques. Multiple users can share a virtual workspace and solve a variety of problems cooperatively in the shared virtual environment (SVE). However, because of poor computer-generated representation of remote participants and communication delay, collaboration within an SVE has a serious drawback compared with collaboration within the real world. That is, awareness information is hard to be transferred so that each participant has significant difficulty in recognizing what other participants are doing. On the other hand, several attempts have been made to construct more informative and more natural collaborative workspace, in which two participants are at the same location. Such workspaces permit face-to-face interaction, and still support real-time 3-D computer graphics from respective participants’ viewpoints. Some systems consist of a rear projector and two pairs of liquid crystal shuttered glasses, others employ two optical see-through head mounted displays (STHMDs). In this paper, we focus on the latter type, because virtual objects can be displayed at arbitrary positions, e.g., between two participants 1 Research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.