Dr. Seungwon Kim is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow investigating the remote collaboration system. With Augmented Reality technology, he adds visual communication cues (such as pointer, sketch, and virtual hands) in the shared live video of a video conferencing system and studies the effect of them for better remote collaboration. He has presented papers at major A/A* international conferences and journals such as CHI, ISMAR, JVCI, TIIS, and CSCW. He also has reviewed dozens of papers at CHI, ISMAR, VR, TVCG, BIT, and IMWUT.
He received his Ph.D. in Human Interface Technology from HITLab NZ in November 2016 with supervision of Prof. Mark Billinghurst, Dr. Gun Lee, and Dr. Christoph Bartneck. During the Ph.D, He received UC doctoral scholarship from University of Canterbury from April of 2012 to April of 2016. He developed one of the early remote collaboration interfaces that anchors virtual sketches in real world without a marker and previous data, and introduced the auto freeze function for a drawing annotation interface.
In 2013, he was selected through the Microsoft Worldwide Internship program by Nexus group at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Redmond. At MSR, he developed interfaces for Skype that includes three additional views (a high quality image view, a map view, and a scene view) together with a live video stream.
He completed Bachelor and Master Degrees in Computer Science in University of Tasmania, and received Tasmanian International Scholarship (TIS) during the Degrees. He is also a golden key member that is only available to top 15 percent students during the Bachelor or Master Degrees.
SharedSphere is a Mixed Reality based remote collaboration system which not only allows sharing a live captured immersive 360 panorama, but also supports enriched two-way communication and collaboration through sharing non-verbal communication cues, such as view awareness cues, drawn annotation, and hand gestures.
Mirrors are physical displays that show our real world in reflection. While physical mirrors simply show what is in the real world scene, with help of digital technology, we can also alter the reality reflected in the mirror. The Augmented Mirrors project aims at exploring visualisation interaction techniques for exploiting mirrors as Augmented Reality (AR) displays. The project especially focuses on using user interface agents for guiding user interaction with Augmented Mirrors.
We have been developing a remote collaboration system with Empathy Glasses, a head worn display designed to create a stronger feeling of empathy between remote collaborators. To do this, we combined a head- mounted see-through display with a facial expression recognition system, a heart rate sensor, and an eye tracker. The goal is to enable a remote person to see and hear from another person's perspective and to understand how they are feeling. In this way, the system shares non-verbal cues that could help increase empathy between remote collaborators.
This research focuses on visualizing shared gaze cues, designing interfaces for collaborative experience, and incorporating multimodal interaction techniques and physiological cues to support empathic Mixed Reality (MR) remote collaboration using HoloLens 2, Vive Pro Eye, Meta Pro, HP Omnicept, Theta V 360 camera, Windows Speech Recognition, Leap motion hand tracking, and Zephyr/Shimmer Sensing technologies
Gun A. Lee, Theophilus Teo, Seungwon Kim, and Mark Billinghurst. 2017. Mixed reality collaboration through sharing a live panorama. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Mobile Graphics & Interactive Applications (SA '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 14, 4 pages. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3132787.3139203
Kim, S., Billinghurst, M., & Lee, G. (2018). The Effect of Collaboration Styles and View Independence on Video-Mediated Remote Collaboration. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1-39.
Gun Lee, Seungwon Kim, Youngho Lee, Arindam Dey, Thammathip Piumsomboon, Mitchell Norman and Mark Billinghurst. 2017. Improving Collaboration in Augmented Video Conference using Mutually Shared Gaze. In Proceedings of ICAT-EGVE 2017 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments, pp. 197-204. http://dx.doi.org/10.2312/egve.20171359
Huang, W., Kim, S., Billinghurst, M., & Alem, L. (2019). Sharing hand gesture and sketch cues in remote collaboration. Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 58, 428-438.
Kim, S., Lee, G., Huang, W., Kim, H., Woo, W., & Billinghurst, M. (2019, April). Evaluating the Combination of Visual Communication Cues for HMD-based Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 173). ACM.
Kim, S., Billinghurst, M., Lee, G., Norman, M., Huang, W., & He, J. (2019, July). Sharing Emotion by Displaying a Partner Near the Gaze Point in a Telepresence System. In 2019 23rd International Conference in Information Visualization–Part II (pp. 86-91). IEEE.
Huang, W., Billinghurst, M., Alem, L., & Kim, S. (2018, December). HandsInTouch: sharing gestures in remote collaboration. In Proceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (pp. 396-400). ACM.
Kim, S., Billinghurst, M., Lee, C., & Lee, G. (2018). Using Freeze Frame and Visual Notifications in an Annotation Drawing Interface for Remote Collaboration. KSII Transactions on Internet & Information Systems, 12(12).
This paper describes two user studies in remote collaboration between two users with a video conferencing system where a remote user can draw annotations on the live video of the local user’s workspace. In these two studies, the local user had the control of the view when sharing the first-person view, but our interfaces provided instant control of the shared view to the remote users. The first study investigates methods for assisting drawing annotations. The auto-freeze method, a novel solution for drawing annotations, is compared to a prior solution (manual freeze method) and a baseline (non-freeze) condition. Results show that both local and remote users preferred the auto-freeze method, which is easy to use and allows users to quickly draw annotations. The manual-freeze method supported precise drawing, but was less preferred because of the need for manual input. The second study explores visual notification for better local user awareness. We propose two designs: the red-box and both-freeze notifications, and compare these to the baseline, no notification condition. Users preferred the less obtrusive red-box notification that improved awareness of when annotations were made by remote users, and had a significantly lower level of interruption compared to the both-freeze condition.
Lee, Y., Shin, C., Plopski, A., Itoh, Y., Piumsomboon, T., Dey, A., ... & Billinghurst, M. (2017, June). Estimating Gaze Depth Using Multi-Layer Perceptron. In 2017 International Symposium on Ubiquitous Virtual Reality (ISUVR) (pp. 26-29). IEEE.
Lee, G., Kim, S., Lee, Y., Dey, A., Piumsomboon, T., Norman, M., & Billinghurst, M. (2017, October). Mutually Shared Gaze in Augmented Video Conference. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, ISMAR-Adjunct 2017 (pp. 79-80). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc..
Kim, S., Lee, G. A., Ha, S., Sakata, N., & Billinghurst, M. (2015, April). Automatically freezing live video for annotation during remote collaboration. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1669-1674). ACM.
Huang, W., Wakefield, M., Rasmussen, T. A., Kim, S., & Billinghurst, M. (2022). A review on communication cues for augmented reality based remote guidance. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, 1-18.
G. A. Lee, T. Teo, S. Kim, and M. Billinghurst. (2017). “Mixed reality collaboration through sharing a live panorama”. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Mobile Graphics & Interactive Applications (SA 2017). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 14, 4 pages.
Jeong, J., Kim, S. H., Yang, H. J., Lee, G. A., & Kim, S. (2023). GazeHand: A Gaze-Driven Virtual Hand Interface. IEEE Access, 11, 133703-133716.