Immersive Displays for the Individual, the Group, and for Networked Collaboration

Abstract.

Despite unprecedented progress in information technology over the past quarter century, the fundamental interface between users and their personal computers remains the same as that first demonstrated by the XPARC Alto in 1973. That system was a brilliant advance over the then-current state of the art. However, its vision—Alan Kay’s notion of a computer as a personal “dynamic book”—is closer to the ultimate portable computer than to the ultimate office environment. We are developing an approach based on several beliefs: 1) the user will find useful computer-generated imagery over a much larger field of view, and with many more pixels, than provided by today’s computer screens; 2) users would rather work in their daily office environment that is always available than in a specialized facility that has to be shared and scheduled; 4) the size of the user’s office is not likely to increase significantly in the future; 5) much of the work in the future, as today, is likely to be a mixture of solo personal work and interaction with one or two people either locally or at a distance.

Guided by these beliefs, we are developing a sequence of increasingly capable environments that we are starting to use ourselves.¹ This development began within the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center in Graphics and Visualization, and more recently it has been focused within the National Tele-Immersion Initiative sponsored by Advanced Network and Services. Our systems consist of multiple video projectors and cameras, most of them mounted on the ceiling, like track lights. (We also occasionally use flat panel displays.) The aim is to have every millimeter of visible surface in the office both lighted by at least one projector and observed by at least one camera. In this way, we can show a wide variety of integrated imagery onto all of the room’s surfaces. We have also experimented with head tracking of the user and with stereo display (achieving left-right separation either through selective polarization or time-sequential presentation), in order to deliver effective 3D imagery within this kind of immersive environment. The user should be able to view and move (2D or 3D) imagery around the office in an intuitive way that feels similar to working with “real” papers and other physical artifacts in that same office.

Although many years of work remain, we are increasingly optimistic that an immersive environment with many of these capabilities will be a very compelling and useful interface for the increasing variety of daily computer-related activities.

R. Raskar, G. Welch, M. Cutts, A. Lake, L. Stesin, and H. Fuchs. The office of the future: A unified approach to image-based modeling and spatially immersive displays. In ACM SIGGRAPH’98 Conference Proceedings, pages 179–188, 1998.