Show Me Around

This project introduces an immersive way to experience a conference call – by using a 360° camera to live stream a person’s surroundings to remote viewers. Viewers have the ability to freely look around the host video and get a better understanding of the sender’s surroundings.

Viewers can also observe where the other participants are looking, allowing them to understand better the conversation and what people are paying attention to. In a user study of the system, people found it much more immersive than a traditional video conferencing call and reported that they felt that they were transported to a remote location. Possible applications of this system include virtual tourism, education, industrial monitoring, entertainment, and more.

Project Video(s):
https://youtu.be/oOc2PiXCtTo

People

Huidong Bai
Alaeddin Nassani
Mark Billinghurst

Publications

  • ShowMeAround: Giving Virtual Tours Using Live 360 Video
    Alaeddin Nassani, Li Zhang, Huidong Bai, Mark Billinghurst.

    Nassani, A., Zhang, L., Bai, H., & Billinghurst, M. (2021, May). ShowMeAround: Giving Virtual Tours Using Live 360 Video. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-4).

    BibTexLinksAbstract
    @inproceedings{nassani2021showmearound,
    title={ShowMeAround: Giving Virtual Tours Using Live 360 Video},
    author={Nassani, Alaeddin and Zhang, Li and Bai, Huidong and Billinghurst, Mark},
    booktitle={Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
    pages={1--4},
    year={2021}
    }
    View: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451555
    This demonstration presents ShowMeAround, a video conferencing system designed to allow people to give virtual tours over live 360-video. Using ShowMeAround a host presenter walks through a real space and can live stream a 360-video view to a small group of remote viewers. The ShowMeAround interface has features such as remote pointing and viewpoint awareness to support natural collaboration between the viewers and host presenter. The system also enables sharing of pre-recorded high resolution 360 video and still images to further enhance the virtual tour experience.
  • Jitsi360: Using 360 images for live tours.
    Nassani, A., Bai, H., & Billinghurst, M.

  • Designing, Prototyping and Testing of 360-degree Spatial Audio Conferencing for Virtual Tours.
    Nassani, A., Barde, A., Bai, H., Nanayakkara, S., & Billinghurst, M.

  • Implementation of Attention-Based Spatial Audio for 360° Environments.
    Nassani, A., Barde, A., Bai, H., Nanayakkara, S., & Billinghurst, M.