This story I wrote for ACM News and was published on October 14, 2021
How do you cut a birthday cake with your friends if the coronavirus pandemic does not allow you to get close to each other?
That was the challenge that the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), faced with professional cake designer Cake Researcher when CWI celebrated its 75th anniversary earlier this year.
Fortunately, CWI has an in-house specialist who solved that problem using virtual reality (VR): Pablo Cesar, a researcher in human-centered multimedia systems and leader of the Distributed and Interactive Systems group at CWI, who also is a professor and chair of Human-Centered Multimedia Systems at the Netherlands' Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Cesar, named an ACM Distinguished Member in 2020, investigates how to improve the ways people use interactive systems to communicate with each other.
While we currently use interactive systems to communicate person to person via flat screens, it would be much more convenient for many applications to communicate via three-dimensional (3D) video, also called volumetric video. Ultimately, we might want to transfer high-quality 3D models of people anywhere in the world in real time, something that Microsoft calls holoportation.
Working on the path to holoportation, Cesar develops state-of-the-art technology for capturing and distributing volumetric video. He showed Bennie Mols around in CWI's two VR rooms. Surrounded by Kinect cameras standing on tripods and hanging from the ceiling, Cesar spoke about where the technology stands right now, and what the future holds.
Read the full story on the website of the ACM.
