Telephone conferences are too inefficient? Let AR technology help you solve the problem

Editor's note: VR technology is very popular now, and it may become the key to changing the gaming industry. Another technology that is as famous as VR technology, AR, is also the focus of the technology circle. Especially Microsoft's HoloLens, its promotional video has conquered almost everyone.

But Microsoft obviously does not intend to limit AR technology to just "showing off". It wants to use experiments to tell us that AR technology can also improve the efficiency of communication between people and become the protagonist of long-distance conference calls.

Face-to-face communication with real people is better than any other communication method. However, there is a group of scholars who are thinking about whether real-person projection using AR technology can be an alternative to face-to-face communication.

How to prove that AR can improve meeting efficiency?

This is what the Microsoft R&D team Room2Room is currently working on: they use the Kinect depth camera and a digital projector to capture a 3D image of a real person in room A, and then project the image onto a chair in room B. There are also the same machine and real people in room B. The researchers said that they can see each other from various angles through this digital image and can interact in this way.

[[162254]]

The results of this research will be presented in the form of a paper at the Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing in San Francisco.

AR (Augmented Reality) - the technology that combines digital images with real life - has been proposed for many years, but it has only been realized in recent years. Microsoft is one of the manufacturers who want to promote AR devices, and the device it brought out is HoloLens, positioning this device as a tool for work and entertainment, while Magic Leap, a mysterious startup located in Florida, is also developing a head-mounted device with the same positioning.

[[162255]]

To make Room2Room work, the researchers used an existing AR project developed by Microsoft called RoomAlive. This technology uses the Kinect depth-sensing camera and a digital projector to create a room-sized virtual space. Unlike the original experiment, they installed these devices in two different rooms. In this way, people in different rooms can interact with each other through these devices.

To understand how much this method can promote communication between people, they recruited seven pairs of people to participate in the experiment - they communicated through the wall in this way. One of the experimenters sat at a table in room A; while the other sat in room B and gave instructions to his partner, telling him what shape of object to build.

[[162256]]

The researchers found that if people were meeting face to face and collaborating on the problem, it would take four minutes, but using AR technology it would take seven minutes, and via a Skype video call it would take nine minutes.

The vision is good, but there are still shortcomings

There are still a lot of other issues that need to be addressed before Room2Room can be used for board meetings and family conferences — and while the depth-sensing equipment and projection hardware will need to expand their applicability, they are currently bulky and cumbersome to set up.

The device is not yet able to capture and project high-resolution images, said Tomislav Pejsa, an intern on Microsoft's Room2Room project and lead author of a paper on the experiment. Low resolution means it's hard to tell where the projected person's eyes are looking.

[[162257]]

Tobias Höllerer, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is researching AR technology. He said that improving resolution is an easy task and predicts that we will use AR technology similar to Room2Room in the next few years. He also believes that VR technology has quickly become popular due to the upcoming release of consumer VR devices. This phenomenon will also promote the development and popularization of AR technology.