A collaborative pointing experiment for analyzing bodily communication in a virtual immersive environment

Virtual environments are a medium in which humans can effectively interact with each other, however up until recently research on body expression in these worlds has been sparse. This has changed with the recent development of markerless motion capture. This paper is a first step towards using these technologies as part of an investigation into a collaborative task in the virtual world. In this task, participants used a pointing gesture as a means to both complete the task and communicate with their partner. The results gained from the experiment were inconclusive, but did show that the effectiveness of the experiment depends largely on the algorithm used to detect gesture and thereby influence the virtual world. It is intended that this research be used to show the potential of examining body expression in collaborative virtual environments.