Prof. Mario Doulis research stay in Japan

February 21-22 2024, I stayed at RIEC to test the shared VR application MeetSpace (working title), that was partially carried out under the RIEC International Cooperative Research Project (ITL) “Physical / Virtual Presentations”.

MeetSpace allows people from geographically dispersed locations to meet in one shared interactive 3D virtual world with integrated live video streams and web functionality for advanced real-time communication.

The first day, my colleagues Jörg Frohnmayer and Jan-Filip Kvrgic in Stuttgart, Germany, and me, met online for a final test and adaptation of the actual version of the application. The morning of the second day I met with BA student Masahiro Tanaka to set up the hardware and to run the application at RIEC. I then met Assistant Professor Miao Cheng, where we discussed the the MeetSpace meeting with Jörg Frohnmayer and Jan-Filip Kvrigic scheduled for 17pm the same day. During this meeting, Professor Yoshifumi Kitamura and Assistant Professor Miao Cheng joined us to participate and discuss.

The meeting went very well. The integrated live video streams wer stable and performant. The virtual world and the avatar animations run fluently. Nevertheless, minor changes have to be done to run MeetSpace fluently with the oculus quest 2 HMD and input devices. Other HMDs like Vive pro and HP Reverb worked properly. The integrated 3D-application developed at RIEC for selecting and showing the avatar animations worked correctly. Last tasks for the refinement of MeetSpace were discussed and will be implemented in March. The final presentation will take place in Mai this year.