FreeWalk: a 3D virtual space for casual meetings

Abstract

A meeting environment for casual communication in a networked community, FreeWalk provides a 3D common area where everyone can meet and talk freely. FreeWalk represents participants as 3D polygon pyramids, on which their live video is mapped. Voice volume remains proportional to the distance between sender and receiver. For evaluation, we compared communications in FreeWalk to a conventional desktop videoconferencing system and a face-to-face meeting.