Toward Transparent Telepresence

Dreams of telepresence are fed by special effects in movies, on stage, and even in mainstream news programs. These illusions may satisfy most passive viewers, but do not work for the actual distant participants. Even today's best "Telepresence" systems have difficulty supporting such simple capabilities as eye contact and gaze awareness among these multiple distant participants. This talk will review some component technologies needed to achieve natural - some would say "transparent" - telepresence (3D acquisition, tracking, rendering, 3D display), will present some recent progress, and will outline several promising future directions. Specifically, recent progress in 3D depth cameras, and in multi‐viewer autostereo displays may make possible dramatically improved telepresence systems within the next few years. Such progress will allow development of a new generation of capabilities, such as the distant participants mixing naturally and arbitrarily in the shared space, which today are beyond consideration of even the best "Telepresence" systems.