Avatar representations improve awareness in desktop and vr collaboration
Exploring Avatar-Based Representations of Desktop Analytical Workflows for Asymmetric Collaborative Visual Analytics
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Working together with a mix of desktop computers and virtual reality (VR) is tricky because VR users often can’t tell what desktop users are doing. The authors created Desk2Avatar, which shows desktop users’ actions in VR using avatars instead of just cursors. They tested two ways to show these avatars and found that avatars help VR users understand what desktop users are working on better than plain cursors do. However, making avatars too detailed can cause distractions and clutter in VR.
What this means in practice
- •For vr software developers: build VR collaboration tools that visually represent desktop users as avatars to improve mutual awareness and focus during joint analysis.
- •For remote collaboration platform teams: integrate avatar-based cues to help users working across desktop and VR maintain better understanding of each other’s workflow activities.
Authors
Tiansu Chen, Yalong Yang, Wai Tong
Abstract
Collaborative visual analytics increasingly occurs across asymmetric desktop-VR settings, with desktop analysis offering precision and efficiency and VR providing spatial and embodied affordances. However, maintaining workspace awareness remains challenging because desktop collaborators are often represented in VR only through indirect cues such as perspective sharing, shared visualization state, or lightweight cursor traces, which do not convey their ongoing analytical activity in a VR-native manner. To address this gap, we present Desk2Avatar, which explores avatar-based representations of desktop analytical workflows in VR. We introduce two representation strategies, Distanced and Embodied, inspired by remote pointing and direct manipulation. We conducted a within-subject study with 18 participants comparing these strategies against a depth-adaptive cursor baseline. Our findings show that avatar-based representations improved collaborator awareness and attentional guidance over cursor cues, while excessive embodiment introduced occlusion, distraction, and additional workload. Finally, we discuss design implications for future desktop-to-VR representations, focusing on balancing collaborator presence, attentional guidance, and workspace readability.