Oliver Kreylos has taken a Microsoft Kinect and used it as a 3-D camera to for a pseudo-holographic 3-D video chat. Obviously this is just a proof of concept, and still has a way to go, but it sure does look interesting. Now if they could only keep her face from tearing in two. I find that a bit, distracting.
Real-time “holographic” video chat using two Kinect cameras to capture one participant, and a custom compression algorithm and network protocol to stream the resulting 3D video data across the Internet.
The other side of the conversation was filmed off a consumer 3D TV with a regular video camera; I apologize for the bad video quality.
Note: the Wiimote was not used for head tracking; only to control the program and to move through the virtual space.
The network protocol uses lossless compression using a Hilbert-curve traversal and run-length and delta encoding for the depth stream, and a Theora video codec for the color stream. The resulting bandwidth is about 750 kB/s for one Kinect camera.
The 3D office model was provided by VITAL Environments.
