VirtualizeMe: Real-time avatar creation for Tele-Immersion environments

Abstract

VirtualizeMe introduces a new design for a fully immersive Tele-Immersion system for remote collaboration and virtual world interaction. This system introduces a new avatar creation approach full-filling four main attributes: high resolution, scalability, flexibility and affordability. This is achieved by a total separation of reconstruction and rendering and exploiting the capabilities of modern graphic cards. The high resolution is achieved by using as much of the input information as possible through lossless compression of the input data and introducing a focused volumetric visual hull reconstruction. The resulting avatar allows eye-to-eye collaboration for remote users. The interaction with the virtual world is facilitated by the volumetric avatar model and allows a fully immersive system. This paper shows a proof of concept based on publicly available pre-recorded data to allow easier comparison.