A Spatial Immersive Office Environment for Computer-supported Collaborative Work - Moving towards the Office of the Future

Abstract

We present our work in building a prototype office environment for computer-supported collaborative work, that spatially - and auditorially - immerses the participants, as if the augmented and virtual generated environment was a true extension of the physical office. To realize this, we have integrated various hardware, computer vision and graphics technologies from either existing state-of-the-art, but mostly from knowledge and expertise in our research center. The fundamental components of such an office of the future, i.e. image-based modeling, rendering and spatial immersiveness, are illustrated together with surface computing and advanced audio processing, to go even beyond the original concept.