High-quality video communications capable of supporting flawless video conferencing and home entertainment without goggles could become a reality.
Professor Lajos Hanzo, Head of the Communications Research Group at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and his team are working on systems to support flawless telepresence with the aid of three-dimensional (3-D) ‘Avatar-style’ stereoscopic video and audio communications.
The team at Southampton has recently made substantial investments in 3D cameras and displays as well as in holographic visualization facilities in support of these radical research goals.
“Existing 3-D video systems are based on people wearing goggles to view them,” said Professor Hanzo. “Our system is expected to become more ‘immersive’ by dispensing with the inconvenience of wearing goggles.”
The other radical objective of the ‘telepresence’ research at Southampton is to conceive more ‘green’ wireless systems, requiring less energy than existing systems.
“The first stage is to conceive flawless, immersive video conferencing concepts and then to transfer the design principles to shirt pocket-sized compact mobile devices, such as camera-phones, within the next decade,” said Professor Hanzo.
“At the moment, flawless video conferencing is not widespread, since the quality is not up to scratch. We are working to ensure that video is transmitted without errors and we are developing ‘green’ techniques to ensure that less energy is used.”
The researchers claim that they are the first group to work on the wireless transmission of holographic video.
They will also popularize these techniques within the framework of their Indian and Chinese research consortia conducting research towards the next generation of wireless systems.
See the post here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110217083024.htm
The original post from the University of Southampton, with more info about the project, is here: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/3648
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Also, from this description of Prof. Hanzo’s work: http://www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk/newcomms/?q=res/int/source_new
Multimedia Source Coding
Flawless Holographic Telepresence… Prof Lajos Hanzo
In the current research era the community may be expected to turn to radical wireless ‘tele-presence’ research. This requires flawless high-performance audio/video codecs, which are resilient against transmission errors. The resultant stream then has to be error correction coded in order to correct the transmission errors and then transmitted over hostile wireless channels with the aid of bandwidth-efficient, yet low-power-consumption ‘green’ transmitters and receivers (transceivers) for three-dimensional (3D) audio/video communications.
So-called stereoscopic video systems may be constructed with the aid of a pair of cameras, which are typically mounted on a rigid rig at a distance of the typical human viewer in order to produce images of what the left and right eye would see. The resultant two-channel video stream may then be stored, transmitted and finally viewed with the aid of stereoscopic displays, but the viewers have to wear specially designed goggles.
Some of the related stereoscopic multimedia components are becoming a commercial reality:
http://www.inition.co.uk/
Provided that the video source signal is recorded from 9-16 different angles/views, more realistic holographic viewing becomes possible without requiring any goggles:
Our team at Southampton is well equipped with the above-mentioned 3D multimedia components, including a cutting-edge holographic display http://www.holografika.com/Products/HoloVizio-128WLD.html
Since the 16 cameras deliver highly correlated video sequences, it is anticipated that a large amount of the predictable, ie ‘redundant’ information may be removed with the aid of holographic video compression.
Our further goal is then to investigate the transmission of the holographic information over hostile wireless channels by inflicting realistic channel-induced hologram-corruption and study their visual effects. Then we embark on designing sophisticated counter-measures using error correction coding and concealment for transmission in 3D holographic tele-presence scenarios.
The investigated systems will also be appraised with the aid subjective testing in the context of the Southampton Open Wireless Network. http://www.sown.org.uk