Spatialized Teleconferencing: Recording and `Squeezed´ Rendering of Multiple Distributed Sites

Teleconferencing systems are becoming increasing realistic and pleasant for users to interact with geographically distant meeting participants. Video screens display a complete view of the remote participants, using technology such as wraparound or multiple video screens. However, the corresponding audio does not offer the same sophistication: often only a mono or stereo track is presented. This paper proposes a teleconferencing audio recording and playback paradigm that captures the spatial location of the geographically distributed participants for rendering of the remote soundfields at the users´ end. Utilizing standard 5.1 surround sound playback, this paper proposes a surround rendering approach that `squeezes´ the multiple recorded soundfields from remote teleconferencing sites to assist the user to disambiguate multiple speakers from different participating sites.