The future of video conferencing is NOT a webcam and a TV, it’s 3D augmented reality, and it could happen really soon

The future of video conferencing is NOT a webcam and a TV, it’s 3D augmented reality, and it could happen really soon

October 13, 2010 3:04 am

I just have to get this out of my head so I can say the idea was mine (ok, maybe someone else has already thought about this, but I haven’t read any major brands announcing anything).

A webcam and a TV for video conferencing has to be one of the most stupid things, no matter how easy to use it is made. Everybody feels stupid having a video call even on a 10′ netbook monitor, imagine a 42” monitor! And for an actual conference with 4+ attendees, following who’ speaking is cumbersome at best (unless you use the acceptable Roundtable).

So here’s what I think someone should be focusing on, instead.

The basic idea should be doable today, as all the technology is well understood and has consumer-grade prices. What you need for this video conferencing vNext is:

1. A room (as small and large as you want) entirely painted in a chroma-key friendly color, green or blue.

1. A bunch of 720p webcams around the room, depending on the room size.

1. A bunch of directional microphones and speakers around the room, also depending on the room size.
2. LCD goggles
   

How it works:

• Each attendee wears the goggles.
• Potentially a combination of webcam/accelerometer/compass sensors precisely follow the attendee’s head.
• With this positional information, the software knows where I’m looking, and also if another attendee is in my field of view.
• If there is another speaker in my “viewport”, then his image is rendered in my LCDs, superimposed leveraging the chroma-key of the green background
• The voice source is also accurately tracked and reproduced in the remote meeting room, using the speaker array to reproduce as faithfully as possible the sound as if it was spoken from the same angle as the source. Alternatively, this could be done with headphones.
• As an attendee walks around the room, the LCDs adjust the augmented reality with whatever is my field of view. So I can walk behind another attendee, interact with him over a whiteboard, whatever.
• The entire room can be projected on the LCDs as whatever meeting environment we choose (a beach with a whiteboard in the middle of the sand, you name it ).

Implementation with current technologies?

• LCD Goggles can be readily purchased at around $400.
• HD webcams are dirty cheap on the $50-60 range.
• Speakers and microphones, not really familiar with the “state of the art”
• As for processing, doing this real-time video processing on a wearable device wouldn’t be possible currently (i.e. the fitpc2 struggles to keep up with even a basic LiveMeeting stream :S). So I guess something like a wireless VGA (hopefully with non-beta drivers for Win7 :S) connected to a room-desktop with plenty of processing power would be needed.

So, hardware-wise, I think this is quite doable with current consumer-priced technologies.

Luckily I’m not traveling much lately, but I wish I had something like this back when I did. Imagine getting together with the family in “the virtual room” to play a game, chat, etc.

/kzu