It can be argued that an ideal teleconferencing system would offer a sense of presence comparable to that afforded by real face-to-face meetiings. In contrast, traditional desktop videoconferencing loses essential socially important phenomena such as true perspective views, live facial expressions and tacit body language. This paper reports a prototype concept demonstrator that has been under development at at BT Laboratores that addresses these issues in order to make the use of video-conferencing a normal social activity rather than a means of merely getting messages across the channel. The idea is to place participants from different remote sites in a coherent virtual environment naturally extended from the real world. The participants have correct views of each other and the illusion of close proximity. The rationale is to build on the demonstrator and enhance it with increasingly realistic functional components as the relevant technical solutions become available. Results are presented of a stereo-based vision system which can synthesis novel(or virtual camera) perspective views of the scene from two fixed camera views. The technique is currently capable of providing 'look-around' views and a certain degree of navigation capability around the scene. Research issues are discussed together with the practical difficulties that remain to be solved in implementing a true-view, telepresence, videoconferencing system.
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