WWoW: World without walls immersive mixed reality with virtual co-location, natural interactions, and remote collaboration

Abstract

Communicating and sharing knowledge through teleconferencing systems is a common phenomenon now a days. But the traditional remote collaboration systems lack naturalness and are not very immersive. Though existing mixed reality systems support natural interactions, many of them use 3D avatars to represent remote users, hence do not reflect finer movements and emotions of the remote users, and a number of them are quite cumbersome to setup and calibrate. We present our remote collaborative mixed reality environment which provides virtual co-location and gestural interactions using Kinect user image masks and skeletons and is simple to setup. The resulting system is both immersive and natural, gives a feeling to participants that they are in the same physical location, communicating and sharing knowledge objects through natural gestural controls and speech [1].