Spanning across three continents, new NTU center shows possibilities in 3-D communication
You walk into your office building and the receptionist calls your name, saying, "Good morning, you look cheery today." Except the receptionist is not a person but a virtual human. That is what Chloe can do and more. She recognises faces, remembers past conversations you have had with her and can have a real conversation with you.
And if you're not able to attend that meeting or orientation tour of a new retail store in the USA, you can soon send your avatar that can mimic – in real-time – your head pose, eye contact, and even your facial expressions. It captures and maps your dynamic motion and appearance onto a humanoid animatronic avatar. This enables you to project a real-time representation of yourself to the people you're talking to at a remote location distances away, as if you are really there. And in the near future, you will even be able to move them around, as researchers work on mounting the avatar on a mobility platform.
Want to find out what your colleagues are up to at your global HQ's watering hole halfway around the world? A research prototype allows you to look through a glass window using 3-D glasses and chat with them in real-time. As you move around, your perspective of the room changes, depending on where you are standing. This room-based telepresence system will in future provide real-time 3D interactions with others thousands of kilometres away, with all parties feeling as if they are in one common room. With the aid of depth cameras and stereoscopic 3-D screens, these telepresence rooms share glass displays that give the illusion that the distant rooms are adjacent, separated only by glass.
These innovations are prototypes of advanced 3-D communication technologies being developed by the new BeingThere Centre at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The $23 million centre is set to drive the next evolution in virtual communications, as it focuses on developing a variety of interdisciplinary and advanced technologies that break down physical barriers, generating real, face-to-face conversation. The BeingThere Centre is a transnational effort spearheaded by NTU, Singapore, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill, USA), as well as the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore.
The Centre was opened today by Mr Michael Yap, Executive Director of the Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office at MDA. The Centre, located within NTU's Institute for Media Innovation, spans 240 square metres, housing new workspace and three new laboratories dedicated to developing advanced and sophisticated forms of interactive real-time 3-D communication, known as "telepresence" and "telecollaboration" systems of the future.
Professor Freddy Boey, NTU's Deputy President and Provost said, "NTU is proud to be associated with the BeingThere Centre because it marks a truly historic and remarkable collaboration among three world-class universities from Singapore, Switzerland and the USA. By combining our R&D capabilities, we can produce breakthrough applications for these advanced telepresence systems of the future. NTU strongly advocates multi- and interdisciplinary research throughout our campus, and so we are very excited about this Centre because of the multi-national and multi-disciplinary collaborations it encourages. I am impressed by the Centre's faculty, researchers and students, who have put in much creativity and insight to a research agenda that is truly interdisciplinary," he added.
The collaboration boasts a team of top scientists across three continents embarking on joint R&D projects to develop telepresence prototypes of the future. Altogether, 71 people – professors, researchers and PhD students – are working together at the Centre to bring these advanced telepresence systems to reality. The parties will share the intellectual property and commercialisation benefits that arise from the joint research.
Mr Michael Yap, Executive Director of the Interactive Digital Media Programme Office at MDA said, "The essence of interactive digital media is to enhance human communication. Telepresence research is set to revolutionise human interaction across space, by creating the effect of 'being there' when one is physically not able to. This has the potential of transforming many sectors including travel and training, and is the type of innovative R&D that MDA is supporting at the BeingThere Centre. Harnessing the brightest minds from Singapore, Switzerland and the United States, BeingThere aims to achieve breakthroughs that will provide a competitive edge for our IDM industry."
The centre is headed by three co-directors: Markus Gross, Professor and Director of the Computer Graphics Lab, ETH Zurich; Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Professor and Director, Institute for Media Innovation, NTU; and Henry Fuchs, Federico Gil Distinguished Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Professor Markus Gross, Co-Director of BeingThere Centre said, "The mission of the BeingThere Centre is to develop the technological framework and platform for the future of telepresence. Novel 3-dimensional display and capture technologies as well as advanced robotics and avatars will make it possible to convey an unprecedented sense of presence to the user. BeingThere will advance conventional location based services, but we are also devising new metaphors for making telepresence mobile and more physical. I am very delighted to see the technical progress we have achieved within the first year since its conception."
Co-Director Professor Nadia Thalmann added, "Today there's a need for people to come and work together, no matter where we are in the world. The projects that we develop at the BeingThere Centre combine many advanced technologies together and extend the feeling of face-to-face communication seamlessly over distance, so that people feel as though they are together in a single place, even though they are in different countries. These advancements will take telepresence to a higher level of immersiveness. I anticipate that they will enable us to better understand each other, work more effectively, and make better informed decisions through the power of these state-of-the-art technologies. I can also foresee many other potential applications, like remote learning and even healthcare delivery."
Professor Henry Fuchs, Co-Director of BeingThere Centre, and Federico Gil Distinguished Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, said, "Telepresence technologies may one day be as commonplace as the personal computer and the mobile phone. These immersive meeting rooms, roving 3D displays, animatronic avatars, and autonomous virtual humans may soon be an integral part of our daily lives. They will reduce the time and expense of long-distance travel, enable more compelling long- distance education, training, health care, tourism and entertainment, and bring together families and friends from across the globe. Precisely how these technologies will develop no one can tell, but it's tremendously exciting to be at the forefront of this revolution. The three universities working together, leveraging each others' capabilities, will achieve much more than any one of us can do alone."
These developments come at a time when telepresence is becoming a multi-billion dollar industry as broadband Internet networks and superfast computer chips enhance their capacity to transmit and process highly intensive data streams. The latest global telepresence and videoconferencing equipment market forecasts estimate that the value of the telepresence, video infrastructure and endpoints market will reach $5.5 billion by 2016.
Provided by Nanyang Technological University
