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

Videoconferencing is going to become attractive for geo-graphically 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.