Time-scaled interactive object-driven multi-party VR

Object-driven interactions have various applications, especially in team activities and sports like volleyball, football, tennis, etc. We define a multi-party virtual world as an environment which includes multiple avatars and computer agents. Latency is one of the primary issues while building a multi-party setup. Delays due to latency cause inconsistencies and unnecessary halts resulting in unrealistic experience in VR. For interactions using objects, it becomes vital to handle the latencies. We present a time scaling algorithm for latency management and synchronization between multiple avatars, while they interact using objects in the VR environment. We propose two time scaling schemes-source and target based. Both these methodologies are dependent on which user's virtual view (source or target) needs to be uniform. Incorporating the presented time scaling schemes, we develop a comprehensive multi-party virtual reality platform to simulate applications which involves interactions between agents and avatars using objects. We adopt a client-server architecture for building our multiuser VR platform which induces flexibility of adding multiple avatars and/or agents to the application. The modular nature of our proposed system enables extension to different VR applications that encompass communication using objects. We exemplify our framework by developing a multi-player VR volleyball game which employs the features of our proposed scheme. We demonstrate the significance of time scaling in the object-driven interactive multi-party VR framework through a comparative user study. We also evaluate the immersion experience in our multi-player volleyball game by a user survey.