Three-dimensional reconstruction from a set of video cameras of environments for virtual collaboration

In the advent of the ubiquity of distributed computing with multimedia capabilities, it is very natural to contemplate collaborations that were not previously possible. In the past scientists, doctors, educators, engineers always had need to share, exchange, debate their work, designs, methodology, knowledge and experience. This was commonly done by attending meetings, publishing in common journals, sometimes books, and visiting each other's laboratories, research institutions, or attending lectures at universities. Recently, advances in computer vision, computer graphics and networking, make possible a new way of communication by immersing participants at remote sites into a common 3D virtual world. The 3D virtual world is high quality, realistic, dynamically updated representation which joins the models of the real worlds at each of the remote sites. This virtual world provides means for telecollaboration, it makes the real-time 3D interaction of people at remote locations possible. We describe the new "teleimmersion" technology. We concentrate on the current state of our research related to the problem of accurate, precise, real-time recovery of the individual remote 3D models, their merging into a common virtual world, and the real-time rendering of this world.