Tele-Immersion Environment for Video Avatar Based CVE

In this paper, we propose a middleware system to realize collaborative virtual environment (CVE) considering tele-immersion environment based on personal computer. Using this middleware system, more immersive and presence feeling is attained and collaborative work can be effectively improved compared with using immersive display like CAVE. We built a prototype system of the proposed method and carried out functional and performance evaluations. As a result, we could verify that our proposed system is very cost effective and provided basic CVE functions on PC environment.