Towards next generation 3D teleconferencing systems

Teleconferencing is becoming more and more important and popular in today´s society and is mostly accomplished using 2D video conferencing systems. However, we believe there is a lot of room for improving the communication experience: one crucial aspect is to add 3D information, but also freeing the user from sitting in front of a computer. With these improvements, we aim at eventually creating a fully immersive 3D telepresence system that might improve the way we communicate over long distances. In this paper we review and analyze existing technology to achieve this goal and present a proof-of-concept, but fully functional prototype.