Immersing tele-operators in collaborative augmented reality

Abstract

In a collaborative system, the level of co-presence, the feeling of being with the remote participants in the same working environment, is very important for natural and efficient task performance. One way to achieve such copresence is to recreate the participants as real as possible, for instance, with the 3D whole body representation. In this paper, we introduce a method to recreate and immerse tele-operators in a collaborative augmented reality (AR) environment. The method starts with capturing the 3D cloud points of the remote operators and reconstructs them in the shared environment in real time. In order to realize interaction among the participants, the operator's motion is tracked using a feature extraction and point matching (PM) algorithm. With the participant tracking, various types of 3D interaction become possible. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.