Dr. Theophilus Teo (Theo) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Empathic Computing Laboratory (ECL) based at the University of South Australia (UniSA). His research interests centre around Mixed Reality, Immersive Collaboration, Telepresence, Interaction Techniques, and Human-Computer Interaction.
Before joining the ECL, he was a Project Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Lab (IMLab, Keio University) working on the JST ERATO Inami JIZAI Body Project, focused on Virtual Living Laboratory, JIZAI Safari, Parallel View, and Immersive Robotic Interaction.
Theo received his Ph.D. at the ECL, UniSA in 2021, supervised by Prof. Mark Billinghurst, Dr. Gun A. Lee, and Dr. Matt Adcock (CSIRO Data61 advisor), investigating interactions and visualisations of a hybrid remote collaboration system, which combined 360 panorama images/videos and 3D reconstruction.
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.
This project explores techniques to enhance collaborative experience in Mixed Reality environments using 3D reconstructions, 360 videos and 2D images. Previous research has shown that 360 video can provide a high resolution immersive visual space for collaboration, but little spatial information. Conversely, 3D scanned environments can provide high quality spatial cues, but with poor visual resolution. This project combines both approaches, enabling users to switch between a 3D view or 360 video of a collaborative space. In this hybrid interface, users can pick the representation of space best suited to the needs of the collaborative task. The project seeks to provide design guidelines for collaboration systems to enable empathic collaboration by sharing visual cues and environments across time and space.
This project explores how a Mixed Presence Mixed Reality System can enhance remote collaboration. Collaborative Mixed Reality (MR) is a popular area of research, but most work has focused on one-to-one systems where either both collaborators are co-located or the collaborators are remote from one another. For example, remote users might collaborate in a shared Virtual Reality (VR) system, or a local worker might use an Augmented Reality (AR) display to connect with a remote expert to help them complete a task.
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
Theophilus Teo, Gun A. Lee, Mark Billinghurst, and Matt Adcock. 2018. Hand gestures and visual annotation in live 360 panorama-based mixed reality remote collaboration. In Proceedings of the 30th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (OzCHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 406-410. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3292147.3292200
Teo, T., Lawrence, L., Lee, G. A., Billinghurst, M., & Adcock, M. (2019, April). Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration Combining 360 Video and 3D Reconstruction. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 201). ACM.
Teo, T., Lee, G. A., Billinghurst, M., & Adcock, M. (2019, March). Supporting Visual Annotation Cues in a Live 360 Panorama-based Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) (pp. 1187-1188). IEEE.
Zhengqing Li, Liwei Chan, Theophilus Teo, and Hideki Koike. 2020. OmniGlobeVR: A Collaborative 360° Communication System for VR. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–8. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382869
T. Teo, M. Norman, G. A. Lee, M. Billinghurst and M. Adcock. “Exploring interaction techniques for 360 panoramas inside a 3D reconstructed scene for mixed reality remote collaboration.” In: J Multimodal User Interfaces. (JMUI), 2020.
Z. Li, T. Teo, G. Lee, M. Adcock, M. Billinghurst, H. Koike. “A collaborative 360-degree communication system for VR”. In Proceedings of the 2020 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS2020). ACM, 2020.
T. Teo, G. A. Lee, M. Billinghurst and M. Adcock. “360Drops: Mixed Reality Remove Collaboration using 360° Panoramas within the 3D Scene.” In: ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics & Interactive Technologies in Asia. (SA 2019), Brisbane, Australia, 2019.
T. Teo, A. F. Hayati, G. A. Lee, M. Billinghurst and M. Adcock. “A Technique for Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration using 360° Panoramas in 3D Reconstructed Scenes.” In: ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology. (VRST), Sydney, Australia, 2019.
T. Teo, L. Lawrence, G. A. Lee, M. Billinghurst, and M. Adcock. (2019). “Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration Combining 360 Video and 3D Reconstruction”. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 201, 14 pages.
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.