A high presence shared space communication system using 2D background and 3D avatar

Displaying a 3D geometric model of a user in real-time has an advantage for a telecommunication system because depth information is useful for non-verbal communication such as finger-pointing and gestures that contain 3D information. However, a range image acquired by a rangefinder is suffered from errors due to image noises and distortions in depth measurement. On the other hand, a 2D image is free from such errors. In this paper, we propose a new method for a shared space communication system that combines advantages of both 2D and 3D representations. A user is represented as a 3D geometric model to exchange non-verbal communication cues. A background is displayed as a 2D image to give the user enough ideas about atmosphere of a remote site. We have constructed a prototype of a high presence shared space communication system to evaluate our method. In experiments, we have found that our proposed method is effective for telecommunication.