Virtual Reality Collaborative Data Visualization

In recent years the research community started to consider Virtual Reality (VR) Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) as a cheap alternative to large displays (wall high resolution displays) for scenarios of collaborative scientific data analysis. VR HMDs seems to naturally support collaboration by providing a shared environment where collaborators have a sense of each other's presence thanks to the use of avatars. Effective collaboration requires collaborators to be aware of each other activities and presence in the space and avatar do provide this. However, gaze awareness or in other worlds awareness of others focus of visual attention is lost due to the lack of eye tracking or due to eye tracking errors. The focus of my research is gaze awareness within VR; I will explore how and when gaze awareness can be restored and perhaps enhanced within collaborative VR data visualization applications.