Telecollaboration - Hardware Support

Wide Field of View, High Resolution Camera

Our current object of collaboration is a wide-field-of-view, high-resolution video camera cluster. The device we are designing will use six conventional cameras in a single cluster to construct an image with a 180 x 80 degree field of view, with six times the resolution of a single camera. The device will be used to capture high resolution images for 3D scene reconstruction as well as for conventional televideo systems.

The technical challenge in developing such a cluster lies in the difficulty of properly merging all the views into a seamless whole. This can only be achieved by optically arranging all the cameras to have the same center of projection. Achieving both the same center of projection and sufficient overlap to allow resampling without seams between the individual views has never been demonstrated to our knowledge. As with the HMD previously built, the multidisciplinary nature of the camera cluster means that we have to draw heavily on expertise at multiple sites.

Several other designs have been attempted for multiple cameras, wide angle field of view, including our own which used multiple cameras each focused on a single participant, but none have a true "common center point of projection" that this design has. This camera feature greatly enhances applications in videoconferencing since it allows multiple receivers to pan around very large and high resolution images simultaneously.