Stumbled across this gem today, a team at the USC Institute for Creative Technology has prototyped a 3D teleconferencing system. I really love using Cisco Telepresence but this takes things to a whole new level–instead of displaying video it actually projects the 3D map of a person's face into space. And somehow it doesn't look unnatural, which surprised me.
They use real-time 3D face scanning along with eye tracking to achieve eye contact in 3D, which I would absolutely LOVE to try.
The display is projected onto a rotating mirror, so this is true 3D, not a Pepper's Ghost effect. I wonder if this can ever be mass-produced in a reliable way, but either way it's a very creative way to achieve this effect.
Watch a video of this very cool project here: http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DTeleconferencing/
P.S. I wonder how large a display like this could practically get… I would imagine a television-size display is not unreasonable, which would mean that Star Wars-style displays are probably in the cards at some point. I love technology.
