Future telephone t-Room
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How is t-Room different from conventional Video Conferencing Systems ?
Conventional VCS   t-Room
  • Spatial Walls: Conventional VCSs force us to communicate through a screen, isolating “this side” from “that side”. This often creates a conflict between distant sites.
  • Temporal Walls: Recording and playback functions may support people to observe the meetings, but never supports people to participate in those meetings.
 
  • In t-Room, people can share the same sense of distance, position, and direction across multiple sites.
  • t-Room records audiovisual events taking place within the room. People can replay the events recorded in the t-Room and re-experience what was happening.
Aim
Remove the Spatio-temporal Walls that exist when communicating with people at a distanve and in the past.
Development Status
Applications: Animation, environment for collaborative musical composition
OS: ViscuitLand
Hardware: Monolith
Developed so far
Technical Features
Creation-oriented communication design theory
- Pursuit of a collaborative work environment to produce media content
ViscuitLand: Basic media interaction environment
- Distributed visual OS: multiple inputs/outputs, simultaneous control of multiple computers, recording, and playback
- Visual language: intuitive, hardware-independent control
Monolith: Building blocks for a shared-space system
- From portable generic units to units embedded in building construction
Collaborative content production applications for t-Room
- e.g., Animation (Viscuit), music (MusicResonator)
Future issues
Evaluation based on actual use
Development of accessory equipment and fine-tuning the environment
- Seamless integration of desks, tools, and other objects in the environment
Enhancement of constituent technologies
- Improved video resolution → eliminate infinite video feedbacks
- Improved high-fidelity sound quality → Separation of sound sources, dereverberation, sound source localization
Flexibility and portability
- Reduce size and cost of the system while improving its versatility