Reconstruction for 3D immersive virtual environments

The future of tele-conferencing is towards multi-party 3D Tele-Immersion (TI) and TI environments that can support realistic inter-personal communications and virtual interaction among participants. In this paper, we address two important issues, pertinent to TI environments. The paper focuses on techniques for the real-time, 3D reconstruction of moving humans from multiple Kinect devices. The off-line generation of real-life 3D scenes from visual data, captured by non-professional users is also addressed. Experimental results are provided that demonstrate the efficiency of the methods, along with an example of mixing real with virtual in a shared space.