Improving Visibility of Gesture Image with Scaling Function for Tabletop Interface in Remote Collaboration(<Special issue>Real World Imaging)

Abstract

This research focuses on the remote collaboration in which a local worker works with real objects by a remote instructor. The goal of this research is to achieve an interaction which allows a remote instructor to provide a local worker with clear and accurate instruction. In particular, the ProCam system consisting of a camera and a projector is placed at the work environment, and the tabletop system consisting of a display, a depth sensor and a camera is placed at remote instructor environment. In remote instructor environment, the image captured by the ProCam system on the work environment is displayed on the tabletop display at the remote location. Next, the instructor's arm is extracted from the image of the instruction environment by the depth sensor. Then, overlapping the image to the work environment allows communicating with keeping information of the embodiment which consists of the moving arms and the pointing. That system is called a view sharing system. The conventional view sharing systems have a problem that is difficult for an instructor to provide detail direction in the remote collaboration. To solve this problem, we propose to use scalable embodiment image as instruction image. Lastly, we conducted the user study to examine the effectivity of the proposal method.