Tele-immersion System Research Articles

Tele-Immersion Concepts.

Tele-immersive systems development is always driven as well as restricted by the available immersive technology. Hence, existing such systems are described mainly from a technological point of view; their conceptual description is usually limited to the description of a scenario that is implementable with or circumvents the limitations of the chosen technology. This focus on technology makes it difficult to compare systems' concepts; moreover, it has led to different views on tele-immersion in different fields, such as remotely controlled robots, immersive video conferencing, and tele-collaboration. In this work, we give a general, structured principle to describe the conceptual part of any tele-immersion system. This principle naturally unifies the different views on tele-immersion. Our idea is based on the insight that, in order to be general, immersion must be described separately for each direction of communication. We characterize communication between locations using a graph; for each directed edge of this graph, we describe immersion as operations on volumes. Using this principle, we define a typology, which enables the comparison and enumeration of tele-immersion concepts. We apply this typology to survey the concepts of existing tele-immersion systems and thereby demonstrate how three well-known tele-immersive scenarios-Marvin Minsky's tele-operated robot, the Office of the Future, and the asymmetric Beaming scenario-integrate naturally. We show how the general principle can be utilized conveniently to grasp conceptual ideas in tele-immersion, such as direct interaction, locational presence, spatial consistency, symmetries, and self-inclusion.

Tele-immersive environments for rehabilitation activities: an empirical study on proprioception

Those with proprioceptive impairments can use their other senses as the proprioceptive feedback. We hypothesize that tele-immersion systems can aid in this supplemented proprioception by providing novel visual perspectives of one's own body. In particular we are interested as to whether the real-time 3D reconstructions used in tele-immersive systems are better or worse than conventional 2D views (i.e. video) with regards to aiding a task requiring proprioception. The objective of this study is to investigate the stated hypothesis by quantifying and ranking the various visual and auditory cues available in a tele-immersive system as they are used during an assigned task. The paper briefly describes a portable immersive VR system, our methodology for quantifying task performance, and results from our experiments with wheelchair basketball athletes.

Multi-camera tele-immersion system with real-time model driven data compression

Vision-based full-body 3D reconstruction for tele-immersive applications generates large amount of data points, which have to be sent through the network in real time. In this paper, we introduce a...

Real-time multidepth stream compression

The goal of tele-immersion has long been to enable people at remote locations to share a sense of presence. A tele-immersion system acquires the 3D representation of a collaborator's environment remotely and sends it over the network where it is rendered in the user's environment. Acquisition, reconstruction, transmission, and rendering all have to be done in real-time to create a sense of presence. With added commodity hardware resources, parallelism can increase the acquisition volume and reconstruction data quality while maintaining real-time performance. However, this is not as easy for rendering since all of the data need to be combined into a single display.In this article, we present an algorithm to compress data from such 3D environments in real-time to solve this imbalance. We present a compression algorithm which scales comparably to the acquisition and reconstruction, reduces network transmission bandwidth, and reduces the rendering requirement for real-time performance. This is achieved by exploiting the coherence in the 3D environment data and removing them in real-time. We have tested the algorithm using a static office data set as well as a dynamic scene, the results of which are presented in the article.