ThingShare: Ad-Hoc Digital Copies of Physical Objects for Sharing Things in Video Meetings

In video meetings, individuals may wish to share various physical objects with remote participants, such as physical documents, design prototypes, and personal belongings. However, our formative study discovered that this poses several challenges, including difficulties in referencing a remote user’s physical objects, the limited visibility of the object, and the friction of properly framing and orienting an object to the camera. To address these challenges, we propose ThingShare, a video-conferencing system designed to facilitate the sharing of physical objects during remote meetings. With ThingShare, users can quickly create digital copies of physical objects in the video feeds, which can then be magnified on a separate panel for focused viewing, overlaid on the user’s video feed for sharing in context, and stored in the object drawer for reviews. Our user study demonstrated that ThingShare made initiating object-centric conversations more efficient and provided a more stable and comprehensive view of shared objects.