VRTogether was honoured twice yesterday at the 11th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (ACM MMSys’20), held virtually on June 8-11. The work carried out by our research team was recognised with the Best Demo and Industry Paper Award and the Best Workshop Paper Award.

On Tuesday 9 June, Jack Jensen (CWI) presented the demo ‘A pipeline for multiparty volumetric video conferencing: transmission of point clouds over low latency DASH‘. In this demo paper, researchers from CWI (Jack Jensen, Shishir Subramanyam, Pablo Cesar), Motion Spell (Romain Bouqueau), i2CAT (Gianluca Cernigliaro, Marc Martos Cabré) and TheMo (Fernando Pérez) introduce an architecture intended for volumetric videoconferencing that provides a highly realistic 3D representation of the participants, based on pointclouds. Their work was honoured with the Best Demo and Industry Paper Award.

The Best Workshop Paper Award was granted to ‘PC-MCU: point cloud multipoint control unit for multi-user holoconferencing systems’ by i2CAT researchers Gianluca Cernigliaro, Marc Martos, Mario Montagud, Amir Ansari and Sergi Fernández. The paper, presented by Gianluca Cernigliaro on Thursday 11 June, introduces the Point Cloud Multipoint Control Unit (PC-MCU): a key component for multi-user holoconferencing systems, where remote participants are represented as Point Clouds.

These awards further demonstrate the project’s achievements towards the development of groundbreaking social Virtual Reality experiences.

Come and follow us in this VR journey with i2CAT, CWI, TNO, CERTH, Artanim, Viaccess-Orca, TheMo and Motion Spell.