Spaceshare: Leveraging Multi-Modal Contextual Information for Sharing Spaces in Video Meetings

People have long sought ways to overcome physical distance and indirectly experience others’ personal spaces, work environments, or specific locations through video meetings and virtual tours. While recent studies have explored remote collaboration within 3D reconstructed spaces to enhance view independence, users still face challenges in understanding their partner and spatial context. To investigate this issue, I conducted a formative study and identified three key difficulties in shared space collaboration: understanding where the partner is looking (view awareness), knowing where the partner is located (location awareness), and retrieving previously visited spaces. To address these problems, I introduce SpaceShare, a system that integrates real-time 3D space reconstruction into video meetings and leverages seven interactive features. Especially, RetraceSpace is the core feature, which supports rapid spatial retrieval—an important yet underexplored aspect of remote collaboration. It combines SpaceTrace, which summarizes spaces as panorama images, and SpaceSearch, which enables users to locate desired places using audio, visual, and spatial cues. The user study demonstrated how SpaceShare and RetraceSpace enhanced the performance of retrieving previous space—exploring the effects of various features for remote collaboration.