A Tele-immersive System Based On Binocular View Interpolation

The main idea behind tele-immersive environment is to create an immersive virtual environment that connect people across networks and enable them to interact not only with each other, but also with various other forms of shared digital data (video, 3D models, images, text, etc.). Tele-immersive environments may eventually replace current video and telephone conferencing, and enable for a better and more intuitive way to communicate between people and computer systems. To accomplish this, participants to a meeting has to be represented digitally with a high degree of accuracy in order to keep a sense of immersion. Tele-immersive environments should have the same "feel" as a real meeting. Interactions among people should be natural. In other to create such a system, we need to solve the key problem of how to create in real-time new views from a fixed network of cameras that will correspond to new viewpoints. We also need to do this for two virtual cameras corresponding to the inter-ocular distance of each participant. In this paper, we will describe a new binocular view interpolation method based on a re-projection technique using calibrated cameras. We will discuss the various aspects of this new algorithm and of the hardware systems necessary to perform these operations in real-time. We will also present early experimental results illustrating the various advantages of this algorithm.