Objective
You are at a meeting table with people spaced around in front of you. You are able to communicate with them effectively as if they are sitting next to you in the same room, in fact you are led to believe they are present in the same room - but they are actually located at several remote locations. For many types of meeting this high-realism telepresence conferencing system will replace the need to travel. Technologies in computer vision and graphics have developed to a position where this vision is achievable. VIRTUE will make this happen in Europe. Achieving this vision will require practical and efficient solutions to technology issues, most importantly wide viewpoint synthesis from multiple cameras that deals with occlusion, and object segmentation from non-uniform backgrounds. A comprehensive set of user experiments will ensure the result is an empirically validated demonstrator. You are at a meeting table with people spaced around in front of you. You are able to communicate with them effectively as if they are sitting next to you in the same room, in fact you are led to believe they are present in the same room - but they are actually located at several remote locations. For many types of meeting this high-realism telepresence conferencing system will replace the need to travel. Technologies in computer vision and graphics have developed to a position where this vision is achievable. VIRTUE will make this happen in Europe. Achieving this vision will require practical and efficient solutions to technology issues, most importantly wide viewpoint synthesis from multiple cameras that deals with occlusion, and object segmentation from non-uniform backgrounds. A comprehensive set of user experiments will ensure the result is an empirically validated demonstrator.
OBJECTIVES
VIRTUE's main project objectives are:
1. To develop the innovative technology necessary to produce a convincing impression of presence in a semi-immersive teleconferencing system;
2. To integrate and demonstrate a telepresence system incorporating such innovative techniques;
3. To investigate the human factors involved in maximising the effectiveness and realism of telepresence and to use them to drive the design of the system.
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
The project consists of five logical phases listed in chronological order below although they overlap significantly in start and end dates:
- Requirements (based on human factors and technical issues);
- Algorithm development (image acquisition and rendering algorithms suitable to be ported to the real-time platform);
- Real-time platform implementation ( developing a real-time image processing platform and implementing the algorithms upon it);
- System implementation (development of the system components including audio and video coding, virtual environment and construction of the complete end-to-end system incorporating the real-time platform);
- Assessment (technical and user assessment tests) In addition, Human Factors experiments will be performed in parallel with these technology developments.
The project therefore consists of five workpackages as follows:
- Algorithms - this workpackage will develop novel image processing algorithms for telepresence videoconferencing that are suitable to be ported t the real-time platform;
- Real-time platform - development of a real-time platform for analysis and rendering and porting the code developed in the Algorithms workpackage to it;
- System - construction of an end-to-end system including physical system set-up, coding, transmission and display;
- Human factors - user requirements analysis, human factors experiments on each of the key features of the system and system evaluation;
-Management - management of the project including planning, proactive management, tracking progress and taking corrective actions when required, reporting, publicity and exploitation plans.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
EC1A 7AJ LONDON
United Kingdom