VirtualCube: An Immersive 3D Video Communication System

TL;DR

VirtualCube is an immersive 3D video conferencing system that uses RGBD cameras and advanced rendering algorithms to enable realistic, eye-contact-preserving remote communication with shared workspaces.

Contribution

It introduces VirtualCube, a standardized, hardware-agnostic 3D conferencing platform with real-time rendering and gaze awareness capabilities.

Findings

Real-time rendering with multi-view stereo and Lumi-Net improves visual quality.

The system preserves mutual eye gaze, enabling natural eye contact.

Supports shared workspaces and attention tracking for remote collaboration.

Abstract

The VirtualCube system is a 3D video conference system that attempts to overcome some limitations of conventional technologies. The key ingredient is VirtualCube, an abstract representation of a real-world cubicle instrumented with RGBD cameras for capturing the 3D geometry and texture of a user. We design VirtualCube so that the task of data capturing is standardized and significantly simplified, and everything can be built using off-the-shelf hardware. We use VirtualCubes as the basic building blocks of a virtual conferencing environment, and we provide each VirtualCube user with a surrounding display showing life-size videos of remote participants. To achieve real-time rendering of remote participants, we develop the V-Cube View algorithm, which uses multi-view stereo for more accurate depth estimation and Lumi-Net rendering for better rendering quality. The VirtualCube system correctly preserves the mutual eye gaze between participants, allowing them to establish eye contact and be aware of who is visually paying attention to them. The system also allows a participant to have side discussions with remote participants as if they were in the same room. Finally, the system sheds lights on how to support the shared space of work items (e.g., documents and applications) and track the visual attention of participants to work items.