As a researcher in the field of visual data processing, and before my time at Disney, I worked on several concepts of immersive telepresence. Inspired by the vision of my dear friend Henry Fuchs and his
OfficeOfTheFuture
, I embarked on a challenging journey in 2000 to build Blue-C. Back then,
Blue-C
was the world’s first holodeck with stereoscopic 3D projection and holographic video. It was a heroic engineering feat in a time of limited graphical, computing and network resources, and we worked for three years to complete the prototype. The project also brought my doctoral students almost to despair at times: “Markus, this darned thing will never work!” Well, after numerous attempts it did somehow work and gave us very valuable insights into what makes a telepresence system really believable.
Being there and future systems
Ten years richer in experience and age, together with partners from the University of North Carolina and the Nanyang Institute of Technology, we launched the next generation research platform for tele-immersion:
BeingThere
. The project drove forward all the key technologies required to construct teleportation systems: holographic video, 3D display, eye correction, digital avatars and much more.
Industry has also made progress in this area and a large number of commercial products are already on the market. Companies such as Cisco have a long history of development of telepresence systems; however, these are more an improved version of existing telepresence tools than a real technological breakthrough that would change our lives for the better.
