BiReality: mutually-immersive telepresence

BiReality (a.k.a. Mutually-Immersive Telepresence) uses a teleoperated robotic surrogate to provide an immersive telepresence system for face-to-face interactions. Our goal is to recreate to the greatest extent practical, both for the user and the people at the remote location, the sensory experience relevant for face-to-face interactions of the user actually being in the remote location. Our system provides a 360-degree surround immersive audio and visual experience for both the user and remote participants, and streams eight 704x480 MPEG-2 coded videos totaling 20Mb/s. The system preserves gaze and eye contact, presents local and remote participants to each other at life size, and preserves the head height of the user at the remote location. Initial user experiences are presented.