Videoconferencing on Steroids

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley are keeping in touch via TEEVE, short for "Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody."

TEEVE is a distributed multi-tier application that captures images using 3-D camera clusters and distributes them over Internet2, compressing/decompressing the 3-D video streams, rendering them into immersive vide, and displaying them on one or multiple large screens.

Most videoconferencing systems currently in use are "jumpy" and really only suited for static presentations--someone setting behind a desk talking into a microphone and looking at a camera. TEEVE, on the other hand, is especially well-suited for conferencing sessions in which physical activities can be smoothly and realistically presented--training sessions, dancing, and the like. In current tests, a dance student in Illinois has been taught by a professor in California. The student stretched and spun about before semi-circular clusters of 3-D cameras on the Urbana-Champaign campus, while the professor executed her moves in Berkeley in a similar environment.

Another thing that sets TEEVE apart from other videoconferencing systems currently is its potential for delivering high-quality images and communications using relatively inexpensive technology and commercial-off-the-shelf products and equipment.

TEEVE is being tested simultaneously the labs of Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ruzena Bajcsy, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:19 AM  Permalink