Imagine walking up to a tall, cylindrical pod, and talking to a life-size, 3-D projection of a faraway friend, family member, or colleague. And not only do you see the person in 3-D, you can walk a full 360 degrees around the pod, and see your conversation partner from every angle — just as if the person was actually standing inside the cylinder.
It may sound like the science fiction of Star Trekor Star Wars, but this is exactly what a team of researchers at Queen’s University have developed in the Human Media Lab. Grandly dubbedTeleHuman, the life-size cylindrical pod allows users to conduct real-time, 3-D and 360-degree video conferences.
It’s not quite a holodeck, but it’s a whole lot closer than today’s 2-D video-chatting options like Skype or FaceTime. (To see the system in action, check out the video below.)
“It’s all about social proximity cues. You can walk up to a person instead of having to phone them or go through an interface,” Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab and Professor of human-computer interaction, told Wired. “Instead, there’s just this pod. It might be designated for a lover or a business partner. It’s near the water cooler, and the same thing is in his or her office or home. You walk up, the thing starts to glow and boom — beam me up, Scotty.”
There are two main components to the system: the cylinder itself, which features a special display and contains an internal projection mechanism, and a set of cameras that track and capture your position as you communicate with your conversation partner.
The Human Media Lab team started with a hollow, cylindrical display that’s made of sandblasted acrylic and mounted on top of a wooden base. A stereoscopic DepthQ projector, along with an Nvidia 3D Vision Kit, is located at the bottom of the base, and a convex mirror is installed at the top. Shooting upward, the projector beams video of your conversation partner into the mirror, which then beams the video back onto the display.
TeleHuman isn’t without its problems, though. The image is a bit too dim and is somewhat low-res, since it’s projected onto such a large display. And in order to see the projection in 3-D, users still need to wear stereoscopic glasses.
“Glasses are a bit of a problem, because you lose eye gaze,” Vertegaal said. “You can either use [TeleHuman] with glasses and get a fully stereoscopic view, or without glasses, but you still get motion parallax. With glasses, the projection totally appears holographic. You get the sense that there’s this person hovering in space.”
Vertegaal says his team hopes to fix these issues and further develop the TeleHuman pod. For instance, they want to have multiple pods video-conferencing simultaneously. Roaming pods, where the devices can move around a space, is another option. Vertegaal also says that he would like to use the Kinect cameras to show the environment that a person is in — currently, the cameras block out background images.
How much would one of these pods cost a consumer? Vertegaal estimates that TeleHuman could be mass produced for around $5,000 per device. A single Kinect sensor costs about $150, and the device uses 10 sensors. So maybe you won’t see the TeleHuman in many offices or homes soon, but hey, we’re just one step closer to making science fiction a reality.
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