VR2Gather: A Collaborative, Social Virtual Reality System for Adaptive, Multiparty Real-Time Communication

Virtual reality telecommunication systems promise to overcome the limitations of current real-time teleconferencing solutions by enabling a better sense of immersion and fostering more natural interpersonal interactions. Many solutions that currently enable immersive teleconferencing employ synthetic avatars to represent their users. However, photorealistic reconstructions have been shown to increase the sense of presence with respect to synthetic avatars in teleimmersive scenarios. In this article, we present VR2Gather, a costumizable, end-to-end system to transmit volumetric contents in multiparty, real-time communication. We present the architecture and evaluate the costs and benefits of using different modules and transport mechanisms in terms of CPU usage, latency, and bandwidth. Moreover, we report the user experience based on applications the system has been used for and how it was customized to meet the requirements using different acquisition and rendering modules.