A wearable system for the wireless experience of extended range telepresence

Extended range telepresence aims at enabling a user to experience virtual or remote environments, taking his own body movements as an input to define walking speed and viewing direction. Therefore, localization and tracking of the user's pose (position and orientation) is necessary to perform a body-centered scene rendering. Visual and acoustic feedback is provided to the user by a head mounted display (HMD). To allow for free movement within the user environment, the tracking system is supposed to be user-wearable and entirely wireless. Consequently, a lightweight design is presented featuring small dimensions to fit into a conventional 13″ laptop backpack, which satisfies the above stated demands for highly immersive extended range telepresence scenarios. Tracking is performed by measuring the time-of-flight (TOF) of coded acoustic signals between a set of fixed loudspeakers and a user-worn microphone array. Dedicated embedded hardware combined with off-the-shelf components is employed to form a robust, low-cost telepresence system that can be easily installed in any living room.