Disambiguation of Horizontal Direction for Video Conference Systems

All existing video conferencing systems which support more than two sites and more than one user at each site suffer from directional ambiguity: not only is it generally impossible for two remote users to look each other in the eyes, but even just horizontal directionality is not preserved. Under horizontal directionality we understand that the direction of the users’ gaze or pointing fingers does not match what the other participants perceive. We present a video tele-conferencing concept, which, by combining existing software and hardware technologies, achieves horizontal directionality for multiple sites and participants at each site. Our solution involves multiple cameras, as well as large stereo or multi-view display walls at each site. Because building a physical prototype of our proposed system would have been fiscally impossible for us, we instead built a prototype for our virtual realit CAVE. In this publication we report on our experiences and findings with this prototype.