It might be called pushing the envelope of virtual reality. What they’ve done at the University of Illinois (USA) is develop a camera cluster and software that can capture activity in real-time and transmit it (more or less) simultaneously over the Internet to other locations. This isn’t like the virtual reality of gaming, where the scenario is programmed. This is framing real action in three dimensions so that it can be transmitted and re-created elsewhere.

This is not exactly a new idea – interactive real-time avatar action – and as the researchers discovered, the technology is willing but the pocketbook is a problem. One of the goals of the project became finding a solution to the high cost of equipment and the even higher cost (or availability) of the necessary Internet bandwidth.

Relatively sophisticated equipment is required for capturing 3-D action, and then again for displaying the images at the other end:

Clusters of visible and thermal spectrum digital cameras and large LCD displays surround a defined space. Information is extracted from the digital images, rendered in 3-D in a virtual space, and transmitted via the Internet to the separate geographic sites. Participants at each site can see their own digital clones and their counterparts at the other sites on the LCD screens and can move their bodies in respond to the images on the screen.

The team has developed a simulation framework that allows users to input their budget, the type of activity they want to learn, the dimensions of the space they want to use, and information about lighting in that space. The framework will determine the number of cameras needed and where they should be positioned. The team has also been working on adding a replay feature that would allow a user to replay a previous session while in the virtual space.
[Source: Futurity]

Most of the testing of the system has been with a team of wheelchair basketball players. They found it not only somewhat of a challenge, but also useful to monitor their play and maneuvers. Although this is academic research, from the beginning practical application has been the goal. Similar research – with somewhat different objectives – is being carried out by major electronics firms (e.g. Sony, Panasonic). No doubt ten or twenty years from now, these efforts will seem clumsy, but they point in the direction virtual reality technology is bound to go. Immersive environments, indeed.