Towards Immersive Telepresence - SCHLOSSTAG'97

2002

ABSTRACT We examine OnLive Traveler as a case study. Traveler is a clientserver application allowing real-time synchronous communication between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client interface presents the user with a shared virtual 3D world, in which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice, managed by the server.

1994

A new approach to telepresence is presented in which a m ultitude of stationary cameras are used to acquire both photometric and depth information. A virtual environment is constructed by displaying the acquired data from the remote site in accordance with the head position and orientation of a local participant. Shown are preliminary results of a depth image of a human subject calculated from 11 closely spaced video camera positions. A user wearing a head-mounted display walks around this 3D data that has been inserted into a 3D model of a simple room. Future systems based on this approach m a y exhibit more natural and intuitive i n teraction among participants than current 2 D teleconferencing systems.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2013

Fig. 1. Two groups of users meet virtually while being surrounded by a virtual city. On the left the local users greet the life-size 3D representations of the remote users. On the right the two groups discuss the tower of a church in a WIM by pointing and gesturing.

Proc. Theory and Practice of Computer …, 2005

This paper presents an alternative to existing methods for remotely accessing Virtual Reality (VR) systems. Common solutions are based on specialised software and/or hardware capable of rendering 3D content, which not only restricts accessibility to specific platforms but also increases the barrier for non expert users. Our approach addresses new audiences by making existing Virtual Environments (VEs) ubiquitously accessible. Its appeal is that a large variety of clients, like desktop PCs and handhelds, are ready to connect to VEs out of the box. We achieve this combining established videoconferencing protocol standards with a server based interaction handling. Currently interaction is based on natural speech, typed textual input and visual feedback, but extensions to support natural gestures are possible and planned. This paper presents the conceptual framework enabling videoconferencing with collaborative VEs as well as an example application for a virtual prototyping system. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): J.6 [Computer-Aided Engineering]: Computer-aided design I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Interaction techniques I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Virtual reality ferencing available to a wide range of users, on various platforms, with little costs. On the other side there are many solutions for remotely accessing technical systems, starting with simple remote shells or remote desktop environments. Some allow several users to collaborate, e.g. using shared whiteboards, shared applications, or complex collaborative VEs. Some provide natural communication facilities. Some are low-cost, some are ubiquitous. But as far as we know, only speech applications running on telephony servers provide a low-cost ubiquitous access to technical systems using natural communication-and they are currently restricted to speech only. We believe that videoconferencing has the potential to extend from human face-to-face communication to a natural communication with remote technical systems using both speech and visual information, e.g. gestures or facial ex

2002

We describe Coliseum, a desktop system for immersive teleconferencing. Five cameras attached to a desktop LCD monitor are directed at a participant. View synthesis methods produce arbitrary-perspective renderings of the participant from these video streams, and transmit them to other participants. Combining these renderings in a shared synthetic environment gives the illusion of having remote participants interacting in a common space.

This paper concerns the design of a system supporting teleconferencing applications. This system aims at creating an immersive environment by compositing a synthetic background with the reconstructed images of remote participants. It also presents natural scenes by employing viewer tracking and rendering images from the vantage point of the viewer. Processing requirements are met by exploiting existing networks of workstations by means of a quality of service based resource management scheme. This approach o ers advantages with respect to the application itself (teleconferencing) and resource requirements. By restricting the transmitted images to the participants only, the required bandwidth becomes much smaller and video quality can be achieved. The employed resource management scheme limits computational resources to general purpose workstations. On the other hand, a synthetic background that matches the real meeting room can be easily designed, giving the impression of a virtual meeting room as an extension of the real one. In this way, remote conference sessions that resemble real life meetings can be held.

IET 5th European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP 2008), 2008

Traditional set-top camera video-conferencing systems still fail to meet the 'telepresence challenge' of providing a viable alternative for physical business travel, which is nowadays characterized by unacceptable delays, costs, inconvenience, and an increasingly large ecological footprint. Even recent high-end commercial solutions, while partially removing some of these traditional shortcomings, still present the problems of not scaling easily, expensive implementations, not utilizing 3D life-sized representations of the remote participants and addressing only eye contact and gesturebased interactions in very limited ways. The European FP7 project 3DPresence will develop a multi-party, high-end 3D videoconferencing concept that will tackle the problem of transmitting the feeling of physical presence in real-time to multiple remote locations in a transparent and natural way. In this paper, we present an overall concept, which includes the geometrical design of the whole prototype demonstrator, the arrangement of the cameras and displays and the general multi-view video analysis chain. The driving force behind the design strategy is to fulfil the requirements of a novel 3D immersive videoconferencing system, including directional eye gaze and gesture awareness.

Tenth IEEE International …, 2008

We present our implementation and evaluation of TEEVE, a distributed 3D tele-immersive system. TEEVE is among the first to support multi-stream/multi-site 3D teleimmersive environments with COTS hardware and software infrastructures. It promotes collaborative physical activities among geographically dispersed sites by immersing the 3D representations of remote participants into a joint 3D virtual space. In this paper, we describe our implementation of TEEVE and introduce the recent advances in TEEVE's different components. In particular, we present an implemented protocol for ViewCast-based semantic-aware data dissemination to support multi-site remote collaboration. We evaluate the TEEVE system by deploying it on the Internet. The experimental results demonstrate that it achieves stable visual quality, soft real-time delay, and efficient resource usage.

Proceedings of the …, 2002

This paper describes a study of remote collaboration between people in a shared virtual environment. Seventeen subjects were recruited at University College London, who worked with a confederate at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Each pair was required to negotiate the task of handling an object together, and moving a few metres into a building. The DIVE system was used throughout, and the network support was Internet-2. This was an observational study to examine the extent to which such collaboration was possible, to explore the limitations of DIVE within this context, and to examine the relationship between several variables such as co-presence and task performance. The results suggest that although the task is possible under this framework, it could only be achieved by various software tricks within the DIVE framework. A new Virtual Environment system is required that has better knowledge of network performance, and that supports shared object manipulation across a network. The participant-study suggests that co-presence, the sense of being together with another person, was significantly and positively correlated with task performance.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2007

We present a novel low-cost method for visual communication and telepresence in a CAVE TM -like environment, relying on 2D stereo-based video avatars. The system combines a selection of proven efficient algorithms and approximations in a unique way, resulting in a convincing stereoscopic real-time representation of a remote user acquired in a spatially immersive display. The system was designed to extend existing projection systems with acquisition capabilities requiring minimal hardware modifications and cost.