Tele-immersion is a technology which allows cooperative interaction between groups of distant people working in the same virtual environment. At the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, interdisciplinary teams are deploying this technology. It involves three real-time steps: taking images of a subject with 48 cameras, transmitting the images over a network, and implanting them in a virtual world. For example, it will allow students and professors on different campuses to meet -- virtually -- and discuss -- lively -- while being in ancient sites of Greece or Italy. The technology offers more promises than academics discussions. Imagine a nurse telling a diabetic how to make an insulin injection while being far away from him. Of course, this technology is facing some hurdles, such as the cost involved to model you with so many cameras. But read more...
Here is the inroduction of the Daily Californian article, which really is a news release from the University of California.
UC Berkeley students may soon be able to meet professors at UC Davis in ancient Sicily for lively intellectual discussions.
Recent visual computer science advances by Ruzena Bajcsy, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, may make such interactions possible.
Bajcsy’s technology takes pictures of a subject in her laboratory from 48 different cameras and combines them into a 3-D image. The image can then be placed into historical Sicily, one of the three cyberspace environments created so far.
But how does this work?
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Here is an illustration of the three-step process of the project: real-time image processing, followed by real-time data transmission and finally real-time image rendering. (Credit: CITRIS) |
You'll find more details about this process at the CITRIS Tele-Immersion Project home page, which adds this about the above image.
First, a three dimensional structure and appearance of the scene is captured by processing image data from multiple viewpoints using stereo algorithm. Second, the acquired scene information is then transmitted to remote sites through high-bandwidth networks, where lastly it is combined with the interactions of the user and displayed dichoptically to reproduce realistic scene rendering.
And what can we expect from such a technology?
"Bajcsy has been really visionary with all of this. We’ve imagined these things and she’s been working with us to make them real," said David Goldberg, director of the UC system Center of Humanities, a collaborator on the project. Art historians, anthropologists and archeologists working with Goldberg have imagined a virtual museum using Bajcsy’s technology where both experts and the public could virtually pick up objects and study them.
The new insights could be far-reaching. Bajcsy aims to impact common people, by studying how people behave and trust each other in cyber environments. Specifically, one could study the difference between cyberspace interaction and a face-to-face interaction, or between interactions where the whole body or just the face or hands are visualized.
However, this technolgy faces several hurdles, such as confusing colors between the user's clothes and the virtual environment. But there are others, such as the fact that this technology is not -- currently -- wireless, and that this huge number of cameras invoves a hefty pricetag.
Currently, a cable is required to transmit the large amount of information from the two sites to the digital environment. The cable is expensive and can only be used between the two sites, but Bajcsy hopes to make the technology available to many social scientists who have only meager funding.
"Digitizing (approximately) 50 cameras into the computer is not easy," said Professor Takeo Kanade, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has performed similar research. "Dealing with such large amounts of data is an enormous task -- just to start the cameras you must press 50 start buttons," he said.
Sources: Erica Rosenberg, The Daily Californian, October 27, 2004; and various websites
8:51:13 PM
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