Telepresence with no Strings Attached: An Architecture for a Shared Reality Environment

The Shared Reality Environment is an ongoing project that explores the use of virtual reality technologies to achieve realistic computer-mediated human-human interaction. The project integrates immersive displays, spatialized audio, haptics, and gesture recognition, through a minimal latency network architecture. As our primary goal is to provide distributed participants with a convincing sense of co-presence without inhibiting natural, spontaneous interaction, the environment must employ unobtrusive technology wherever possible.