The ICOCOON Virtual Meeting Room: A Virtual Environment as a Support Tool for Multipoint Teleconference Systems

Part 5: Mixed Reality and 3D WorldsInternational audienceGlobalization and increasing collaboration between remote teams drive the need for teleconference systems. However, currently no videoconferencing system matches the face-to-face experience for a business meeting with many participants in a flexible and affordable manner. In search for a better solution, we created a Virtual Meeting Room (VMR) application that visualizes key events detected using computer vision (e.g., participant entering the meeting room, talking, presenting) in a 3D virtual environment. The goal was to provide a good sense of overview to users when many meeting participants - represented by 3D avatars - from remote locations join a teleconference. In this paper, a technical overview of the working prototype - built using 3D game technology - is presented. Also, feedback from multiple user tests performed during the development of the prototype is discussed and presented as a set of recommendations. From the technical perspective, we found that existing 3D game technology is mature, affordable and contains the features needed to build the VMR application. From the users’ and experts’ feedback, we conclude that the VMR has merits as a teleconferencing support tool accompanying a video stream that conveys more detailed non-verbal communication of the active speaker

A new approach to combine texture compression and filtering

Texture mapping has been widely used to improve the quality of 3D rendered images. To reduce the storage and bandwidth impact of texture mapping, compression systems are commonly used. To further increase the quality of the rendered images, texture filtering is also often adopted. These two techniques are generally considered to be independent. First, a decompression step is executed to gather texture samples, which is then followed by a separate filtering step. We have investigated a system based on linear transforms that merges both phases together. This allows more efficient decompression and filtering at higher compression ratios. This paper formally presents our approach for any linear transformation, how the commonly used discrete cosine transform can be adapted to this new approach, and how this method can be implemented in real time on current-generation graphics cards using shaders. Through reuse of the existing hardware filtering, fast magnification and minification filtering is achieved. Our implementation provides fully anisotropically filtered samples four to six times faster than an implementation using two separate phases for decompression and filtering. Additionally, our transform-based compression also provides increased and variable compression ratios over standard hardware compression systems at a comparable or better quality level