Supporting Embodied and Remote Collaboration in Shared Virtual Environments

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on businesses, educational institutions, and other organizations that require in-person gatherings. Physical gatherings such as conferences, classes, and other social activities have been greatly reduced in favor of virtual meetings on Zoom, Webex or similar video-conferencing platforms. However, video-conferencing is quite limited in its ability to create meeting spaces that capture the authentic feel of a real-world meeting. Without the aid of body language cues, meeting participants have a harder time paying attention and keeping themselves engaged in virtual meetings. Video-conferencing, as it currently stands, falls short of providing a familiar environment that fosters personal connection between meeting participants. This paper explores an alternative approach to virtual meetings through the use of extended reality (XR) and embodied interactions. We present an application that leverages the full-body tracking capabilities of the Azure Kinect and the immersive affordances of XR to create more vibrant and engaging remote meeting environments.