Shared XR Room Mapping With Occlusion Masks for Remote Collaboration
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing XR environments fail to effectively facilitate collaboration among remote and local users, lacking integration into workflows for remote workers and not supporting interactions similar to in-person experiences.
Innovation Solution
A system that maps a real-world room to create a shared XR environment, incorporating validation criteria and generating multiple versions (local and remote) with occlusion masks to mitigate rendering issues, allowing local users to interact with real-world representations and remote users to participate via virtual objects.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional video calling is used for remote work, then communication can be maintained, but the interaction quality deteriorates compared to in-person experiences
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates virtual copies of physical spaces (rooms, tables, whiteboards) and objects within the XR environment, allowing remote users to interact with replicated versions of real-world elements. This enables natural collaborative behaviors like writing on a virtual whiteboard or gathering around a virtual table, mimicking in-person experiences while maintaining remote connectivity
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transitions from 2D video call interfaces to 3D immersive XR environments. By adding spatial depth and volumetric presence, remote users can move freely around virtual spaces, approach colleagues and objects from different angles, and engage in natural body language communication, fundamentally improving interaction quality beyond flat video screens
2Ease of operation
If XR environments are created for remote collaboration, then interaction quality improves, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent designs the XR environment to support multiple collaboration functions within a single unified space: video conferencing, shared whiteboarding, document viewing, and spatial audio all coexist in the same virtual room. This multi-functionality reduces the need for separate applications and simplifies the overall system architecture while providing comprehensive collaboration tools
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces virtual objects and spaces as intermediaries between remote users. Instead of direct peer-to-peer video calls, users interact through the mediated XR environment which handles spatial relationships, object sharing, and interaction coordination, simplifying the complexity of direct multi-user synchronization
3Adaptability or versatility
If virtual objects are used in XR environment, then remote user participation improves, but rendering errors increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different rendering qualities and levels of detail to different objects and regions within the XR environment based on user proximity and importance. Critical interaction objects maintain high rendering fidelity, while background elements use optimized lower-detail representations, balancing visual accuracy with rendering performance
Solution Approach 2:
The patent dynamically adjusts rendering parameters such as polygon count, texture resolution, and shadow quality based on user position, device capabilities, and scene complexity. This adaptive parameter adjustment maintains visual quality for essential elements while reducing overall rendering load to minimize errors and improve performance
Data Source
AI summary
A room manager can generate mappings for a real-world room that support a shared XR environment. For example, the real-world room can include real-world objects and surfaces, such as a table(s), chair(s), wall(s), door(s), window(s), etc. The room manager can generate XR object definitions based on information received about the real-world room, object(s), and surface(s). For example, the room manager can implement a flow that guides a user equipped with an XR system to provide information for the XR object definitions, such as real-world surfaces that map to the XR object(s), borders (e.g., measured using a component of the XR system), such as borders on real-world surfaces, semantic information (e.g., number of seat assignments at an XR table, size of XR objects, etc.), and other suitable information. Implementations generate previews of the shared XR environment, such as a local preview and a remote preview.