System Overview
COVID-Vision is a multi-user VR grocery-store experience designed to encourage awareness of social distancing in public spaces. I first-authored a paper describing the system and its interactions.
Architecture
VR Client
The Unity experience presents a grocery store with shopping interactions, non-player characters, and live-user avatars.
Multi-user Interaction Layer
Photon PUN 2 coordinates live participants in the shared environment. The published system supports up to 20 concurrent live users.
Proximity Feedback Layer
The application visualizes interpersonal safe zones during the experience and presents post-task proximity feedback for reflection.
Core Features
- Shared grocery-store scene: Participants shop and encounter both live users and non-player characters.
- Interpersonal safe zones: Spatial feedback makes proximity visible during interaction.
- Multi-user participation: Photon PUN 2 supports the live shared experience.
- Post-task feedback: A summary prompts reflection on encounters and distances.
Interaction Pipeline
- A participant enters the shared grocery-store scene.
- The participant shops and moves among avatars and non-player characters.
- The system tracks spatial proximity in the scene.
- Safe-zone cues make nearby encounters visible.
- Post-task feedback summarizes proximity during the session.
Technical and Design Challenges
Coordinating live users and scene characters
The system combined synchronized live-user avatars with non-player characters in one interactive grocery store.
Turning distance into understandable feedback
Real-time safe zones and a post-task summary translated spatial measurements into cues participants could notice and discuss.
Publication
The system appeared as a 2021 IEEE VRW paper. The published description reports system capabilities; it does not establish a measured behavior-change outcome.