Construction of a three-sided immersive telecollaboration system

The so-called "blue-c" is a novel three sided immersive projection system, which has been especially designed to support telecollaborative teamwork (M. Gross et al., 2000). Therefore, special projection screens are used, which can be switched to a transparent state electrically. The user is captured with sixteen cameras in total, standing outside of the projection room. These images are then processed to create a 3D representation of the user, which can be projected in a second installation. The whole installation has been engineered and implemented at the ETH Zurich (W. Elpass et al.). A special active stereo projection system, based on LCD projectors with additional shutters proved to work very well at a very competitive price. The paper describes the background, the decisions made and the problems that had to be overcome.