Next generation of shared virtual environment using tele-immersion

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Communications technology is constantly changing the way in which people interact, both for business and personally. With the advent of such technologies as video conferencing, web conferencing and high-speed networks, communicating has taken a huge step forward from email and telephone. It is now possible to communicate via real-time video and audio, bringing a new dimension to the disembodied voice of the telephone. With ever growing improvements to networking technology and increases in processing power and display capability, a new generation of communication tools are just around the corner. Shared virtual environments provide a possible successor for the traditional videoconference. Shared virtual environments attempt to create an immersive, shared, 3D world that connects people across networks and enables them to interact not only with each other, but with various other forms of digital data e.g. 3D models, video, images, text and sounds. The goal of this project is to produce an environment that enables a more realistic, flexible and intuitive way to communicate. To facilitate natural communication, scenes and particularly participants must be represented as realistically as possible. New low cost cameras provide the opportunity to view the real world in a photo-realistic real-time manner, making it an ideal choice for representing scenes and avatars in a shared VE. Creating or synthesizing in real-time these new views of a scene from a network of cameras is the problem of view synthesis and is one of the main focuses of this research work. In this research project, we will develop novel real-time algorithms to perform view interpolation as well as foreground/background segmentation to separate the participants from their environment. We will also develop new server/client technology capable of dealing with real-life networking problems such as latency and the smart management of