A wearable system for the wireless experience of extended range telepresence

Extended range telepresence aims at enabling a user to experience virtual or remote environments, taking his own body movements as an input to define walking speed and viewing direction. Therefore, localization and tracking of the user\´s pose (position and orientation) is necessary to perform a body-centered scene rendering. Visual and acoustic feedback is provided to the user by a head mounted display (HMD). To allow for free movement within the user environment, the tracking system is supposed to be user-wearable and entirely wireless. Consequently, a lightweight design is presented featuring small dimensions to fit into a conventional 13" laptop backpack, which satisfies the above stated demands for highly immersive extended range telepresence scenarios. Tracking is performed by measuring the time-of-flight (TOF) of coded acoustic signals between a set of fixed loudspeakers and a user-worn microphone array. Dedicated embedded hardware combined with off-the-shelf components is employed to form a robust, low-cost telepresence system that can be easily installed in any living room.