Being There: Augmented Reality for Remote Collaboration

 

Dr. Matthew Turk

UC Santa Barbara

 

Collaborating remotely on tasks that require engagement with the physical environment is difficult with existing videoconferencing technologies, since they do not adequately support a shared 3D space or ways to effectively communicate spatial information. We propose a framework for unobtrusive mobile telecollaboration that integrates the physical environment, supporting rich interaction by using computer vision-based tracking and mapping, along with augmented reality techniques to communicate spatial information about a novel scene. This allows for a decoupling of the participants’ views of the environment based on a real-time tracking and mapping technique that supports general camera motion (both rotation-only and translational movement) in the 3D environment. The approach effectively integrates panorama mapping and tracking with a keyframe-based SLAM system, behaving like one or the other depending on the camera movement, with no prior information about the environment. We describe the framework and prototype system, user studies to evaluate the benefits of the interface, and promising applications of the technology.

 

Matthew Turk is a professor of Computer Science and former chair of the Media Arts and Technology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-directs the UCSB Four Eyes Lab, focused on the “four I’s” of Imaging, Interaction, and Innovative Interfaces. He received a B.S. from Virginia Tech, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining UCSB in 2000, he worked at Microsoft Research, where he was a founding member of the Vision Technology Group in 1994. He is on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems and the Journal of Image and Vision Computing, and he serves on advisory boards for the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction and the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. Prof. Turk has received several paper awards and has been general or program chair for several major conferences, including the 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). He is an IEEE Fellow, an IAPR Fellow, and the recipient of the 2011-2012 Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies.