ITEM: Immersive telepresence for entertainment and meetings with commodity setup

This paper presents an Immersive Telepresence system for Entertainment and Meetings (ITEM). The system aims to provide a radically new video communication experience by seamlessly merging participants into the same virtual space to allow a natural interaction among them and shared collaborative contents. With the goal to make a scalable, flexible system for various business solutions as well as easily accessible by massive consumers, we address the challenges in the whole pipeline of media processing, communication, and displaying in our design and realization of such a system. Extensive experiments show the developed system runs reliably and comfortably in real time with a minimal setup requirement (e.g., a webcam, a laptop/desktop connected to the public Internet) for tele-immersive video communication. With such a really minimal deployment requirement, we present a variety of interesting applications and user experiences created by ITEM.