Masking the Effects of Delays in Human-to-Human Remote Interaction

Abstract

Humans can interact remotely with each other through computers. Systems supporting this include teleconferencing, games and virtual environments. There are delays from when a human does an action until it is reflected remotely. When delays are too large, they will result in inconsistencies in what the state of the interaction is as seen by each participant. The delays can be reduced, but they cannot be removed. When delays become too large the effects they create on the human-to-human remote interaction can be partially masked to achieve an illusion of insignificant delays. The MultiStage system is a human-to-human interaction system meant to be used by actors at remote stages creating a common virtual stage. Each actor is remotely represented by a remote presence created based on a stream of data continuously recorded about the actor and being sent to all stages. We in particular report on the subsystem of MultiStage masking the effects of delays. The most advanced masking approach is done by having each stage continuously look for late data, and when masking is determined to be needed, the system switches from using a live stream to a pre-recorded video of an actor. The system can also use a computable model of an actor creating a remote presence substituting for the live stream. The present prototype uses a simple human skeleton model.