Alfonso Torrejon | University of Chicago (original) (raw)

Papers by Alfonso Torrejon

This describes research into a mechanism that enables geographically dispersed participants in te... more This describes research into a mechanism that enables geographically dispersed participants in telepresence system to be placed in artificial views that better mimics a real life lecture or meeting room situation. In support of this we present a novel solution for collaborative activity that converts participant’s into Mixed Reality’s visual objects allowing them to interact more naturally from any location, enhancing their communication. The system enables people to logon, choose a seat or location (which also assigns them a virtual presence in that location) thereby enabling them to talk and interact, with their virtual neighbors. The sound volume can be controlled so as to produce a kind of virtual bubble that surrounds the participants allowing the audio to be directional and selective. In addition, attendees to the real environment can interact with the remote attendees.

This is a paper accompanying (and describing) a demonstration. The intention of this demonstrati... more This is a paper accompanying (and describing) a demonstration. The intention of this demonstration is to present a novel immersive telepresence system that enables remote students to participate in seminars and lectures using online streaming video and audio connections. In this system, a virtualized video view is created using a 360° panoramic video projected onto a 180° curved projected screen (immersive shell). This recreates a more natural human-like perception of real environments and thereby stimulating the learning process;. 3D audio is also collected and reproduced at the remote location adding to the realism. To accomplish this we use a 360° mirror situated in the classroom which we use with a camera to transmit a panoramic image to the remote users where they reconstruct the original image from spherical to Cartesian. To process the audio we use a small array of microphones at the classroom end. In addition, we provide various tools to allow the participants to control their position within the virtualized views, thereby creating an innovative technology and user experience. We will be demonstrating this system at the conference.

The general focus of this paper concerns the development of telepresence within intelligent immer... more The general focus of this paper concerns the development of telepresence within intelligent immersive environments. The overall aim is the development of a system that combines multiple audio and video feeds from geographically dispersed people into a single environment view, where sound appears to be linked to the appropriate visual source on a panoramic viewer based on the gaze of the user. More specifically this paper describes a novel directional audio system for telepresence which seeks to reproduce sound sources (conversations) in a panoramic viewer in their correct spatial positions to increase the realism associated with telepresence applications such as online meetings. The intention of this work is that external attendees to an online meeting would be able to move their head to focus on the video and audio stream from a particular person or group so as decrease the audio from all other streams (i.e. speakers) to a background level. The main contribution of this paper is a methodology that captures and reproduces these spatial audio and video relationships. In support of this we have created a multiple camera recording scheme to emulate the behavior of a panoramic camera, or array of cameras, at such meeting which uses the Chroma key photographic effect to integrate all streams into a common panoramic video image thereby creating a common shared virtual space. While this emulation is only implemented as an experiment, it opens the opportunity to create telepresence systems with selectable real time video and audio streaming using multiple camera arrays. Finally we report on the results of an evaluation of our spatial audio scheme that demonstrates that the techniques both work and improve the users’ experience, by comparing a traditional omni directional audio scheme versus selectable directional binaural audio scenarios.

Historically, learning has been seen as part of the human process to achieve a status, income and... more Historically, learning has been seen as part of the human process to achieve a status, income and a better future. Traditionally students travel to attend lectures or participate in brainstorming and training sessions benefiting from the interaction afforded by the physical learning environment, the classroom, and the wider University facilities. However, financial pressures arising from national and global competition are putting pressure on Universities to find more cost-effective ways of delivering education. While distant learning has been always there, it is clear that this approach needs substantial improvements in order to deliver a similar learning experience to physically attending a university. To these end, this paper presents a novel immersive telepresence system that allows remote or distant students to customize their virtual presence at seminars and lectures based on a 360° panoramic video projected onto a 180° curved projected screen (an immersive shell). Audio is also collected with 3D information in order to be reproduced more naturally at the remote location. The arrangement is intended to provide online learners with a more faithful replication of human perception, akin to what they would experience in a real learning environment. Technically, to do this we use a 360° mirror to capture the lecture room scene and transmit it to remote locations where it is reconstructed the original image from spherical to Cartesian coordinates providing a novel but natural immersive experience. This paper describes the motivation, model, computational architecture and our main findings.