Creating a Metaverse-Based Meeting Room with Live Avatar Control and Web Communication

This paper presents the design and implementation of an interactive virtual meeting room aimed at revolutionizing remote communication as well as addressing the limitations of the current video conferencing systems by transitioning from traditional 2D video conferencing to an immersive 3D environment. The system integrates Python scripts and the MediaPipe library to detect and process body movements and gestures, enabling participants to control their avatars intuitively in a virtual environment created using Unity. Remote participants, utilizing their webcams to capture body movements translated into corresponding avatar actions within the virtual space, join the meeting via a web browser. The virtual meeting room allows users to navigate and observe the environment dynamically and independently from any perspective they want using keyboard and mouse inputs. By employing the Unity Render Streaming package, the virtual environment is rendered in web browsers. Our system enhances the interactive experience by providing spatial awareness and the ability to customize appearance locations within the virtual space, thus personalizing the meeting experience. The System Usability Scale survey results, with an average score of 75, indicate high user satisfaction and effectiveness in virtual meetings. This work highlights the technological components, user experience, and potential implications of our system, underscoring its scientific contribution to advancing metaverse-based remote communication technologies.