Networked telepresence system using web browsers and omni-directional video streams

In this paper, we describe a new telepresence system which enables a user to look around a virtualized real world easily in network environments. The proposed system includes omni-directional video viewers on web browsers and allows the user to look around the omni-directional video contents on the web browsers. The omni-directional video viewer is implemented as an Active-X program so that the user can install the viewer automatically only by opening the web site which contains the omni-directional video contents. The system allows many users at different sites to look around the scene just like an interactive TV using a multi-cast protocol without increasing the network traffic. This paper describes the implemented system and the experiments using live and stored video streams. In the experiment with stored video streams, the system users an omni-directional multi-camera system for video capturing. We can look around high resolution and high quality video contents. In the experiment with live video streams, a car-mounted omni-directional camera acquires omni-directional video streams surrounding the car, running in an outdoor environment. The acquired video streams are transferred to the remote site through the wireless and wired network using multi-cast protocol. We can see the live video contents freely in arbitrary direction. In the both experiments, we have implemented a view-dependent presentation with a head-mounted display (HMD) and a gyro sensor for realizing more rich presence.