Building a high realistic media space by superimposing a remote person´s figure on the local view

Videoconferencing environment is one of the most popular ways of connecting remote people. To achieve conveyance of realistic sensation through its video image is one of the major goals. One way to implement highly realistic image is to use life-size scale image of a remote person which is presented by a large display. However at the same time, the large display hides a large area from the local person´s front view and replaces it with other remote side´s background. This might decrease the person´s full surrounding awareness. To solve these conflicting effects of the large display, we propose extracting remote person´s figure from his/her background and superimposing him/her over local person´s front view. In this way, the local person feels as if the remote person exists in front of him/her in his/her spatial environment. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of such a system and the preliminary experiment. The initial result of the experiment suggested that the proposed system achieved high realistic sensations, increased the local surrounding awareness, and minimized the remote background´s distraction compared with a conventional videoconferencing system.