“It’s tough presenting to a conference when you, as the presenter, lack visual cues. Sure, you can see the people seated around tables, you can see the layout of the room, but if it’s a larger group, you miss the important communication signals of eye contact, raised eyebrows…or people falling asleep. Video conferencing with smaller groups does allow for transition of greater detail (a smile, confused look), but it doesn’t allow for eye contact. Contact is with the camera. Tracking eye movement is important for feeling connected with others.”

George points to this video about ‘HeadSPIN: A One-to-Many 3D Video Teleconferencing System’. According to the blurb, “This installation presents a 3D teleconferencing system that enables true eye contact between a three-dimensionally transmitted subject and multiple participants in an audience. The system is able to reproduce the effects of gaze, attention, and eye contact not available in traditional teleconferencing systems.”

“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.

The project called ‘Tele-immersive Environment for Everybody’ or TEEVE hooks up two off-the-shelf 3D cameras to a PC with a Firewire port. A gateway server at each site sends and receives the different video streams using standard compression techniques. A renderer is used to project the virtual interactions on a big screen monitor, creating a real-time virtual 3D effect. It’s like web conferencing, but with a virtual reality twist.

The system was on display Thursday at an Intel Labs “research day” in Mountain View, California. At the event Intel showcased technologies the company is working on.

In their demonstration of the TEEVE idea, Arefin and his colleague stood in two opposite corners of a room with light sabers in hand. They had 3D stereo vision cameras called BumbleBee 2 pointed at them. As the duo dueled, they could see their 3D images captured and reflected on screen.

The idea has applications beyond gaming. It can be used in business, sports and medicine, says Arefin. An experiment by the University had two dancers from different locations dancing together on a large screen.

The system is part of the quest towards more visual computing, says Jack Gold, principal analyst with consulting firm J. Gold Associates.

“Moving to a visual environment, from the text heavy one we are in right now, is one of the most important issues that we have to deal with in computing,” he says. “As they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.”

The biggest challenge in the application for the researchers comes from the demand on computational and network resources that the system imposes. TEEVE uses real-time 3D reconstruction algorithms that are necessary to convert 2D frame images to 3D frame that also includes the depth information. To optimize it, researchers have used multi-threaded computation and Arefin says TEEVE can work on PCs with high-end Intel processors.

“Our goal is to make the system portable and easily deployable because of its use of off-the-shelf components,” he says.