Towards next generation 3D teleconferencing systems

Abstract

Teleconferencing is becoming more and more important and popular in today's society and is mostly accomplished using 2D video conferencing systems. However, we believe there is a lot of room for improving the communication experience: one crucial aspect is to add 3D information, but also freeing the user from sitting in front of a computer. With these improvements, we aim at eventually creating a fully immersive 3D telepresence system that might improve the way we communicate over long distances. In this paper we review and analyze existing technology to achieve this goal and present a proof-of-concept, but fully functional prototype.