An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Smart Communities

In 2016, the Japanese Government publicized an initiative and a call to action for the implementation of a Super Smart Society announced as Society 5.0. The stated goal of Society 5.0 is to meet the various needs of the members of society through the provisioning of goods and services to those who require them, when they are required and in the amount required, thus enabling the citizens to live an active and comfortable life. In spite of its genuine appeal, details of a feasible path to Society 5.0 are conspicuously missing. The first main goal of this survey is to suggest such an implementation path. Specifically, we define a Smart Community as a human-centric entity where technology is used to equip the citizenry with information and services that they can use to inform their decisions. The arbiter of this ecosystem of services is a Marketplace of Services that will reward services aligned with the wants and needs of the citizens, while discouraging the proliferation of those that are not. In the limit, the Smart Community we defined will morph into Society 5.0. At that point, the Marketplace of Services will become a platform for the co-creation of services by a close cooperation between the citizens and their government. The second objective and contribution of this survey paper is to review known technologies that, in our opinion, will play a significant role in the transition to Society 5.0. These technologies will be surveyed in chronological order, as newer technologies often extend old technologies while avoiding their limitations

Nocloud: Experimenting with Network Disconnection by Design

Application developers often advocate uploading data to the cloud for analysis or storage, primarily due to concerns about the limited computational capability of ubiquitous devices. Today, however, many such devices can still effectively operate and execute complex algorithms without reliance on the cloud. The authors recommend prioritizing on-device analysis over uploading the data to another host, and if on-device analysis is not possible, favoring local network services over a cloud service