15th IEEE/ACM DS-RT 2011

Tutorial

Title:
Telepresent Humans

Presenters:

David Roberts
Norman Murray
Carl Moore
Toby Duckworth

Centre for Virtual Environments, Salford University, UK

Date:
Sunday, September 4, 2011  14:30-17:30

Tutorial abstract:

A grand challenge shared between computer science and communication technology is reproducing the face-to-face meeting across a distance. At present, we are some way from reproducing many of the semantics of a face-to-face meeting. Furthermore, while we can reproduce some in certain mediums and others in others, we are currently unable to reproduce most in any.

This tutorial begins by explaining some of the primary challenges in reproducing the face to face meeting and goes on to showing how our research is examining both the problems and solutions. We compare the approaches of "telepresent" video conferencing, immersive virtual environments, and 3D video based tele-immersion.

A central theme is the communication of appearance and attention. We explain why video conferencing can only faithfully reproduce the first while virtual reality only the second, and how close free viewpoint 3D video is coming to doing both. We look at tracking technologies for driving avatars, ranging from from eye-trackers to the Kinect, and various ways of capturing people with multistream video and reproducing them in 3D video.

Location:
The Lowry in the Hexagon Room
Pier 8, Salford Quays, M50 3AZ