VR-Together will be present at Laval Virtual on 20 and 21 March 2019 to present the capabilities of the web-based pipeline for communicating and collaborating in photorealistic social immersive environments.

TNO will present the projects work on the web-based pipeline with a paper and talk. The talk will be presented by Tom De Koninck from TNO at Laval Virtual’s ConVRgence on 21st March at 16:40.

The paper (in publication), aligned to the talk, discusses the use of photorealistic representation of in virtual environments. While Virtual Reality applications become more multi-user experiences, mostly artificial avatars are used for the representation of users in the virtual environment. This is fine for many multi-user scenarios but is less than ideal in more social settings like talking to your family, friends or business partners.

The paper and presentation outline the concept of Social VR based on real-time photorealistic capture and representation of users. Particularly, the web-based framework that allows for both the creation and consumption of photo-realistic social VR in 3D and 360-degree environments is introduced.

Further, the system is evaluated both in a 360-degree remote collaborative meeting and in a full 3D experience. The initial results indicate that a photo-realistic approach indeed offers a natural communication to the users with a high presence and immersion.

The paper will be published in the VRIC’s 2019 proceedings.