New Video Conferencing Method Demonstrated--TEEVE

from Technology News Daily

Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody, or TEEVE, is a system that's being test-driven simultaneously across thousands of miles this spring in the labs of Klara Nahrstedt, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Ruzena Bajcsy, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Click here to watch a 2-minute video clip taken at UIUC.
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In technical terms, TEEVE is a distributed multi-tier application that captures images using 3-D camera clusters and distributes them over Internet2 (the network reserved for research and corporate clients), compressing and decompressing the 3-D video streams, rendering them into immersive video and displaying them on one or multiple large screens.

In layman's terms, think of TEEVE as a turbocharged version of videoconferencing, but with some very fancy new bells and whistles. Most notably, Nahrstedt said, TEEVE makes it possible for people to view their counterparts at remote sites from all angles.

And an important feature that sets it apart from other tele-immersive video-conferencing systems currently being developed or used elsewhere is its potential for delivering high-quality images and communications using relatively inexpensive technology and COTS ' or commercial-off-the-shelf products and equipment.

Among other potential applications, Nahrstedt expects TEEVE will, in the not-too-distant future, allow for the following scenarios to take place:

# After accidents, medical patients and physiotherapists meet in cyberspace, where the physiotherapist demonstrates muscle-strengthening exercises.

# Students are able to learn new sports or movement activities, such as tai chi, even when living in remote locations where no local teacher is available.

# While communicating with an elderly parent, adult children living far away can more accurately assess a parent's physical condition.

Nahrstedt predicts that it will be at least five to six years before TEEVE and other tele-immersive 3-D multi-camera collaborative environments are routinely used in university or corporate settings.