Toward a compelling sensation of telepresence: demonstrating a portal to a distant (static) office

In 1998 we introduced the idea for a project we call the Office of the Future. Our long-term vision is to provide a better every-day working environment, with high-fidelity scene reconstruction for life-sized 3D tele-collaboration. In particular, we want a true sense of presence with our remote collaborator and their real surroundings. The challenges related to this vision are enormous and involve many technical tradeoffs. This is true in particular for scene reconstruction. Researchers have been striving to achieve real-time approaches, and while they have made respectable progress, the limitations of conventional technologies relegate them to relatively low resolution in a restricted volume. We present a significant step toward our ultimate goal, via a slightly different path. In lieu of low-fidelity dynamic scene modeling we present an exceedingly high fidelity reconstruction of a real but static office. By assembling the best of available hardware and software technologies in static scene acquisition, modeling algorithms, rendering, tracking and stereo projective display, we are able to demonstrate a portal to a real office, occupied today by a mannequin, and in the future by a real remote collaborator. We now have both a compelling sense of just how good it could be, and a framework into which we will later incorporate dynamic scene modeling, as we continue to head toward our ultimate goal of 3D collaborative telepresence.