The t - Room — Toward the Future Phone

The t-Room is a remote computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) system that we are developing. Our approach is to build rooms with an identical layout, including walls of display screens on which users and physical or virtual objects are all shown at life size, and to provide symmetry of awareness and immersion in each other’s physical space. This allows users in the t-Rooms to feel as if they were in the same room. Furthermore, by introducing recording and playback capabilities to the activities that occur within the t-Room, we can achieve asynchronous communication that overcomes the temporal barrier. The t-Room has greater potential to reproduce reality and awareness in remote collaboration than conventional videoconferencing systems. Moreover, as a step toward the future phone, it will enable us to implement a wide variety of telecommunication services that give the feeling of being in the same room and to create a new social interaction style through a large-scale immersive user interface. The t-Room—Toward the Future Phone † NTT Communication Science Laboratories Soraku-gun, 619-0237 Japan Email: [email protected]