Multimedia ambiance communication based on actual moving pictures in a stereoscopic projection display environment

Multi-media Ambiance Project of TAO has been researching and develop an image space, that can be shared by people in different locations and can lend a real sense of presence. The image space is mainly based on photo-realistic texture, and some deformations which depend on human vision characteristics or pictorial expressions are being applied. We aim to accomplish shared-space communication by an immersive environment consisting of the image space stereoscopically projected on an arched screen. We refer to this scheme as `ambiance communication.' The first half of this paper presents global descriptions on basic concepts of the project, the display system and the 3-camera image capturing system. And the latter half focuses on two methods to create a photo-realistic image space using the captured images of a natural environment. One is the divided expression of the long-range view and ground, which not only gives more realistic setting of the ground but commands more natural view when synthesized with other objects and gives potentialities of deformations for some purposes. The other is the high quality panorama generation based on even-odd field integration and image enhancement by a two dimensional quadratic Volterra filter.