An immersive 3D video-conferencing system using shared virtual team user environments

Videoconferencing is going to become attractive for geographically distributed team collaboration, specifically to avoid travelling and to increase flexibility. Against this background this paper presents a next generation system - a 3D videoconference providing immersive tele-presence and natural representation of all participants in a shared virtual meeting space to enhance quality of human-centred communication. This system is based on the principle of a shared virtual table environment, which guarantees correct eye contact and gesture reproduction. The key features of our system are presented and compared to other approaches like tele-cubicles. Furthermore the current system design and details of the real-time hardware and software concept are explained.