Comp 790-011: Seminar on Telepresence

Fall 2011

Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:30pm - 1:45pm  FB 220

Instructor: Henry Fuchs

Course Description

In this course we will study the long-standing quest to develop systems that give users the illusion of being in a distant place and of interacting with distant people as if they were all together with them in the same space.  We will study technical papers and monographs, both historic and current, study complete systems and well as individual component technologies.  We will take advantage of the new BeingThere International Research Center for Telepresence and Telecollaboration (between NTU Singapore, ETH Zurich and UNC Chapel Hill) to interact with experts on telepresence from around the world.  We will also be joined, from time to time, by collaborators from Cisco Telepresence and Cisco Corporate Research, using our local state-of-the-art Cisco TelePresence system.  Students will each occasionally lead presentation and discussion of selected papers.  Students will also individually or in pairs develop a project and implement some part of it during the semester.  A wide variety of lab equipment will be made available to students for their projects, from Kinect depth cameras, to high-resolution color cameras, large-format stereo displays, projectors, and tracking equipment. Student will present the project results at the end of the semester and perhaps submit a paper for publication.

Topics to be covered will focus on 3D acquisition and 3D display: 3D motion capture, segmentation, reconstruction, rendering methods for multi-projectors and stereo, display technologies to achieve stereo and autostereo, humanoid avatars, and perceptual issues, especially as their relate to 3D perception.

Prerequisite: One course in either computer graphics or computer vision or permission of instructor.