Tele-Immersion

This Wired Gadget Lab post talks about the ‘Tele-immersive Environment for Everybody’ project of researchers at the University of Illinois. From the article: "If your Wii boxing buddy or Star Wars light saber duel partner moved to a different town, technology can help bring you together for just one more game. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Intel have created a system that can support collaborative physical activities from different geographical locations.

“We can capture motions of the human body in real time and bring them together on a big screen,” says Ahsan Arefin, a doctoral student currently involved with the project.

This David Orban's Blog post reports researchers at the Laboratory of Eidomatics at University of Milan, in cooperation with Eximia have developed a new immersive interface for visualizing Second Life environments and interacting with them. From the post: "Real 2nd Life an integrated system composed of a semi-circular screen, of almost 3 meters high, and 7 meters of diameter. The image of the live Second Life grid is spread on the screen through the use of four high luminosity Barco projectors, fed by multi-headed Matrox graphics cards, inserted in standard PCs running a specially recompiled Second Life client which introduces a stereoscopic image doubling calculating the depth of the image in real time.

Here's another article, this time from the The Gateway newspapers, that describes in a general way the iTRAnCE (Immersive Telepresence Room ANd Collaborative Environment) project I'm working on. From the article: "Teleconferencing with holograms using the living-room TV may soon be as routine as using the phone, according to a local product developer working with the University of Alberta.

Research consortium TR Labs is working with the U of A computer science department to bring a different type of videoconferencing—tele-immersion, where people meet in a virtual space—to life.

David Antoniuk, the business development director of TR Labs, said it will give people a richer experience while getting in touch with others.

This ZDNet's Emerging Technology Trends Blog article reports computer scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) have developed a media player for interactive 3D-environments. From the article: "‘Our system allows us to actively involve the viewers — they can walk through rooms and select objects, for instance,’ says one researcher. This is possible because each element — a person, a video clip or a sound — can be integrated into the display. And if you’re a — filmed — spectator, your image also can be interactively inserted into the viewer.

While quite general, this CBC News article talks about the research project I'm working on at University of Alberta: a next generation virtual videoconferencing environment for tele-immersive collaboration. The project, called iTRAnCE (Immersive Telepresence Room ANd Collaborative Environment), is a collaboration between UofA AMMI Lab, TRLabs and HP Labs. From the article: "Edmonton researchers are developing a virtual reality technology for business meetings that they say is pretty close to science fiction — specifically, like Star Trek's famous holodeck.

In the television hit, the holodeck let spaceship crew members enter holographic computer-simulated environments that seemed like the real thing.

This press release reports Digital Video Enterprises announced the launch of what they see as the ultimate telepresence experience – the DVE Tele-Immersion Room – which was available for world preview at the Telepresence World Conference being held in San Diego.