Reality Portals
Karl-Petter Åkesson Kristian Simsarian
Swedish Institute of Computer Science
kalle@sics.se E-mail: kristian@sics.se
Through interactive augmented virtuality we provide the ability to
interactively explore a remote space inside a virtual environment. This
paper presents a tool and technique that can be used to create such
virtual worlds that are augmented by video textures taken of real world
objects. The system constructs and updates, in near real-time, a
representation of the user-defined salient and relevant features of the
real world. This technique has the advantage of constructing a virtual
world that contains the relevant video-data of the real world, while
maintaining the flexibility of a virtual world. The virtual-real world
representation is not dependent on physical location and can be
manipulated in a way not subject to the temporal, spatial, and physical
constraints found in the real world. Another advantage is that
spatializing the video-data may afford more intuitive examination.