Supporting a wide set of linked non-verbal resources remains an evergreen challenge for communication technology, limiting effectiveness in many applications. Interpersonal distance, gaze, posture and facial expression, are interpreted together to manage and add meaning to most conversations. Yet today's technologies favor some above others. This induces confusion in conversations, and is believed to limit both feelings of togetherness and trust, and growth of empathy and rapport. Solving this problem will allow technologies to support most rather than a few interactional scenarios. It is likely to benefit teamwork and team cohesion, distributed decision-making and health and wellbeing applications such as tele-therapy, tele-consultation, and isolation. We introduce withyou, our telepresence research platform. This paper describes the end-to-end system including the psychology of human interaction and how this drives requirements throughout the design and implementation. Our technology approach is to combine the winning characteristics of video conferencing and immersive collaborative virtual environments. This is to allow, for example, people walking past each other to exchange a glance and smile. A systematic explanation of the theory brings together the linked nature of non-verbal communication and how it is influenced by technology. This leads to functional requirements for telepresence, in terms of the balance of visual, spatial and temporal qualities. The first end-to-end description of withyou describes all major processes and the display and capture environment. An unprecedented characterization of our approach is given in terms of the above qualities and what influences them. This leads to non-functional requirements in terms of number and place of cameras and the avoidance of resultant bottlenecks. Proposals are given for improved distribution of processes across networks, computers, and multi-core CPU and GPU. Simple conservative estimation shows that both approaches should meet our requirements. One is implemented and shown to meet minimum and come close to desirable requirements.
Working machines in construction sites or emergency scenarios can operate in situations that can be dangerous to an operator both\ud
for direct control of the machine or teleoperation in co-presence. Remote operation has been typically hindered by limited sense\ud
of presence of the operator in the remote of the environment to due the reduced field of view of cameras. Starting from these\ud
considerations we are introducing a novel real-time panoramic telepresence system for construction machines. This system does\ud
allow fully immersive operations in critical scenarios while keeping the operator in a safe location at moderate distance from the\ud
construction site. An omnidirectional stereo vision head mounted over the machine acquires and streams data to the operator with a\ud
streaming technique that focuses on the current direction of site of the operator. According to the motion of the operators head, the\ud
telepresence system will determine the involved cameras to use and the appropriate region of interest in cameras. The operator uses\ud
a head-mounted display to experience the remote site also with the possibility to view digital information overlaid to the remote\ud
scene as a type of augmented reality. The paper addresses the design and architecture of the system starting from the vision system\ud
and then proceeding to the immersive visualizatio
Free viewpoint telepresence is currently an active and very interesting field of research. Its focus is reproducing in real-time a remote subject (or environment) in a way it can be rendered from an arbitrary point-of-view. This paper presents a novel approach to real-time reconstruction and transmission of a high-quality 3D model of the subject/environment based on the meshification of the depth map produced by a range camera system (i.e. time-of-flight, Kinect). The generated mesh is compressed through a variant of the state-of-the-art single-rate mesh compression algorithm, ready to be transmitted over the network towards the rendering location in a fast and efficient way.
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