Mobil Holoportation
Prior to mobile Holoportation, Microsoft research presented an earlier work of Holoportation, real time virtual 3D teleportation. The new technology that can capture, texture, compress and transmit a 3D reconstruction of an object. In the recent work, they moved the technology to be mobile with less number of cameras and low bandwidth. Here, I will talk about the mobile holoportation in light of its minimization from the original holoportation, the validity of collaboration and interaction.
Prior to mobile Holoportation, Microsoft research presented an earlier work of Holoportation, real time virtual 3D teleportation. The new technology that can capture, texture, compress and transmit a 3D reconstruction of an object. In the recent work, they moved the technology to be mobile with less number of cameras and low bandwidth. Here, I will talk about the mobile holoportation in light of its minimization from the original holoportation, the validity of collaboration and interaction.
Tracking and cameras
In the earlier setup, there are a large number of cameras in different locations, which makes it a very expensive and computationally complicated system in terms of cameras calibration and data processing. As its mentioned on the project website, the mobile holoportation is a challenging scenario that needs to tackle the processing of large amount of data. The mobile holoportation is reduced hence to only two cameras but that comes at the cost of quality. With only two cameras, the virtual avatar is missing a large a mount of data. The 3D reconstruction is not complete in the way that you can see the avatar from different viewpoints, which breaks the illusion of 3-dimentionality. The limited bandwidth will also limit the extending of the technology to a collaborative or intractable environment, as these will add to the computational complexity.
Although the system itself is mobile, the virtual avatar is not. The main role of the cameras here is to capture the object in a very limited space with almost no presence of tracking functionality. The technology is moving to mobility but it came at the cost of system dynamic.
Collaboration
The physical worlds of participants in holoportation are different and no obvious existence of collaborative shared space, and hence it’s considered to be a genre of communication rather than collaboration. The participants can see a 3D representation of each other, hear and talk to each other, which compose a good communication channel in real time. In a collaborative augmented/virtual reality experience, participants should seamlessly interact with shared virtual contents. Either in co-located or remote augmented reality, they should be able to manipulate a shared virtual content in a synchronous way. For holoportation to be collaborative, remote participants should be enabled to interact with a shared virtual space to feel that they are virtually co-located. While its possible to add collaboration capability in the original holoportation, it might be limited in mobile holoportation due to limited bandwidth.
Interaction
The participant in holoportation can interact with each other using body gestures, speech and other non-verbal cues. The user navigation however is limited to the actual physical movements. The navigation is almost impossible for the virtual avatar in the mobile holoportation as in that scenario their physical space is limited to the back seats in a moving car. Interacting with virtual contents is presumably impractical due to the low bandwidth in this case. As mentioned earlier, participants don’t have the ability to manipulate the virtual avatar or the virtual environment in real time. However, it does have the capability in the original holoportation to record reconstructed 3D contents, miniaturize them and possibly manipulating them offline.
Interaction capability can be added in which participants can interact with virtual contents or controls but that requires extra work in the case of mobile holoportation.
Mobile holoportation added to the 3D capture technology by adding the mobility of the system but with a less dynamic application of telepresence.