Transparent screen brings remote participants to the meeting

IDG News Service - A telepresence system that uses a transparent screen can make meeting participants appear as if they are in the same room, without the need for 3-D glasses, vendor Digital Video Enterprises says.

The DVE Immersion Room doesn't use 3-D cameras or holograms, but its transparent polymer screen is invisible to viewers across a conference table, so remote participants appear suspended in space, said Steve McNelley, co-founder of DVE. The system projects their images onto the slanted, highly reflective screen from below, and anything behind that screen shows through so they appear to be in the same room. The company demonstrates it in a video on its Web site.

If you think that sounds like an amusement-park trick, you're not far off. DVE, based in Irvine, California, has been building custom display systems for concerts and amusement parks for years. With the Immersion Room, the company has packaged what it's learned along the way into a product, McNelley said. The Immersion Room can accommodate meetings with nine people at each end of a broadband connection. It has surround sound and a 120-inch diagonal display that can use video quality levels ranging from 720p at 60 frames per second (fps) to 1080p at 60fps. DVE or a system integrator will design and build the system in the customer's conference room.

"It literally is delivered from carpet to ceiling," McNelley said. "You give us the room, we go in and we design the whole experience." To conduct meetings, DVE recommends enterprises have at least 10M bps (bits per second) of bandwidth over an MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network tuned for video.

The system carries a list price of $895,000 per room, about three times as expensive as a top-end, three-screen Cisco Telepresence Meeting system. (The price varies, depending on the particular setup.) But DVE aims to go beyond the experience provided by the Cisco platform, which shows meeting participants' images on large plasma displays with cameras mounted above.

"What's called telepresence today is really just videoconferencing," McNelley said. A key advantage of DVE's transparent screen is that the camera goes directly behind it, at what would be roughly the remote participant's eye level, he said. That way, users can look toward each others' eyes and be looking into the camera, which is hidden, he said. By contrast, telepresence systems that use solid plasma or LCD screens have cameras above the screen, so gazing into the camera requires looking up.

Users can simultaneously project onto the screen diagrams and digital mockups that appear to float in midair. The same screen can be used for showing movies and video presentations in the conference room, McNelley said. The system can also be adapted to show the type of stereoscopic 3-D used in feature films, with glasses, he said.