STC's Telecollaborative Environments
STC's Telecollaborative Environments
Our Vision
The STC has a vision of what we perceive the telecollaborative
environment of the future might be. We developed VRapp to
serve as a testbed for our telecollaborative research. This allows us
to see if our ideas actually make sense to use in a real
application. To see some recent work that has been with researchers at the
University of Pennsylvania, click here.
Snapshot
This is a snapshot taken during a final rehearsal for
the NSF Site-visit on the 25th of June 1996.
Click on image for a larger version
What do I see in this picture...
- Avatars
Avatars
are representations of humans in a computer generated environment.
An avatar would move the same way you move, look the same way you
look and behave like you.
In this picture we see Brook's
avatar on the left and Russ's on the right. Brook is represented
by a cube with a picture of his face on one side. Since Brook
uses a boom-viewer his avatar gazes in the same direction as the
boom-viewer is pointing to. Russ is recorded with a video camera
while these images are placed on the face of a cube. The video is
shipped over a
T-1 line and is recorded and displayed in
real-time. Russ uses a monitor based viewer and the placement
of his viewer-camera will be the position of his avatar. The
snapshot is taken from the left eye of a viewer that was inside an
HMD. The avatar of this person was done the same as Brook's
avatar.
- Alpha_1 model
The object on the table is modeled in
Alpha_1.
One of the
users has control over the model and can adjust it on the fly.
The model is part of a video-see-through HMD as designed by
D'nardo
Colucci together with the University of Utah. The sphere
is the eyeball, the cube the display and the cylinder a camera.
The optical path of the eye and the camera are clearly the same
through the use of mirrors.
- Picking
The users with a viewer that is capable of "picking" (currently
the boom and the monitor based viewer) can grab the object and
move it around, scale it and rotate it.
- Multiple viewers
There are several different viewers available. Besides the standard
OpenInventor monitor based viewers a BoomViewer was implemented at
Brown. This viewer uses the fakespace
boom for stereo head-tracked viewing, similar to the HMD viewer.
The use of OpenInventor and dynamically linked libraries made it easy
to integrate the code written by four different people.
- Environment
The room that we're in is based on a meeting area in Sitterson
Hall, UNC. This way the user will have the feeling (s)he's in a
comfortable place and will likely have a little bit higher sense
of presence.
- Importing objects
Geometry files based on the
OpenInventor
format can be brought
into or deleted from the scene with a simple command. These
objects can then moved, rotated and scaled with the picking
function. The slides behind Brooks' head are examples of this
function. He gave a talk while being in the boom viewer and using
these slides.
- Video
The video can be captured of one person and send to one other
person at the time. The video is recorded with a camera pointed
at the user. The images are then send over the net with an
MBONE tool called vic
- Audio
The users communicated primarily by voice. An
audio link was established through the audio part of the
video conference T-1 line that connects the three sites that
are present in the environment.
- Camera
A fourth non-moving camera-avatar [not visible in this snapshot]
can be brought in the scene. The view of this avatar is used for
people not actually present in the environment but are watching what is
happening.
The computer science departments of Brown University, the University of
Utah and the University of North-Carolina worked together on the
different parts of the software. Work is in progress to enhance the
telecollaborative environment further, making it a tele-design-tool.
Links
STC Center at UNC
STC Center
STC Telecollaboration
STC Telecollaboration Project
Goto Loring's recent and future work
Mail us, We're happy with comments.
Marco Jacobs, Wed Aug 21 16:47:29 EDT 1996
Updated by Adam Lake, Sun Aug 24 23:56:42 EDT 1997
The latest enhancements to VRapp.