Title : A high-quality distributed collaborative virtual environment based on low-cost depth cameras



Project Lead : Filippo Filippo Bann From : PERCRO, Scuola Superiore S. Anna (None)

Dates : from -- to 2013-12-10 15:27:01

Description :

Motivation and objectives :
Distributed Collaborative Virtual Environments (DCVE) have proven to be extremely useful in many fields, allowing people to share the same perceptions of a common environment across very large distances. Still, they usually need complex infrastructures for 3D acquisition, data transmission and rendering, making high costs and setup complexity significant issues. With the introduction of low-cost depth cameras with relatively high resolution such as the Microsoft Kinect, live capturing of 3D data is now potentially available to a large audience. The introduction of depth cameras also facilitates the setup and extends the possible places to be captured to literally any environment. Visualization and sharing of such data, especially from multi-camera setups, still remains an open problem which we would like to address. The main objective of the proposed project is to develop a DCVE exploiting large-scale, immersive visualization facilities and an acquisition system based on multiple, low-cost depth cameras. The main addressed issues will be: - to transmit representations of the acquired environments in real-time between two facilities - to present high-quality reconstructions of the shared environments inside a CAVE rendering system at each site.

Teams :
The research activity of the Computer Graphics and Virtual Environments group is focused on Distributed Virtual Environments. Within this area, research involves: immersive visualisation systems, high efficiency rendering algorithms, geometric data compression (both for storage and transmission) and geometry fidelity for reconstructed 3D models.

Dates :
starting date : 05 September, 2012
ending date : 14 September, 2012

Facilities descriptions :
http://visionair-browser.g-scop.grenoble-inp.fr/visionair/Browser/Catalogs/REACTOR.UK.html

Recordings & Results :
The work developed during the visit is part of a large project aimed at realizing an immersive Distributed Collaborative Virtual Environment. One of the main challenges of the project is the transmission of the depth information towards remote locations. Such a depth information is acquired using a low-cost RGBD camera such as Microsoft Kinect.

Conclusions :
The work developed during the visit was successfully used to run an interactive telepresence session in a CAVE, and was subsequently integrated into the BEAMING project. This was published at VRCAI 2012.




Project Images :

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Other project resources :

Visionair Report.pdf


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Project funded by the European Commission under grant agreement 262044