Abstract:

The new global scenario imposed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has given rise to an atypical and problematic situation in many areas. In a very short time, the abrupt change from face-to-face to remote has not only required a rapid generalization of the use of digital technology, but also a change in methodology and communicative interactions. In the field of education, teachers have had to interact in new environments, with the combined use of face-to-face and non-face-to-face teaching being a major challenge.

In this study, we present the design and implementation of a cyberpresence system for educational environments using Microsoft's HoloLens 2 mixed reality (MR) glasses. This tool allows teachers to integrate classroom students into a common space with remote students connected by videoconferencing. In this paper we focused on educational purposes, but this could be used in other environments requiring remote communication.

To fulfill our main proposal, we designed a web client-server architecture, where the developed HoloLens 2 application accesses remote web services to:
1) remove the background of the remote students' images captured by their webcam in order to integrate the students' holograms in the mixed environment, and
2) classify the predominant emotions of the students to show them to the teacher in the MR visualization.

Thus, in the proposed implementation the heavy computational part of the system is all done in remote services. In addition, we have focused the work on providing a system that can be used by the students without any economic impact, just by using a simple webcam.

Keywords:

Telepresence, cyberpresence, hololens, dual-mode teaching.