SBIR Phase I: Integrating the Physical Environment into Remote Collaboration

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project results from the potential for the technologies being developed to incorporate the spatial dimension into video-based communication tools, allowing people to share their physical spaces with remote participants, who can then independently explore and annotate these spaces, providing new opportunities for remote collaboration. The commercial impact of this innovation is potentially substantial. Such spatial telecollaboration technologies could find practical use in a wide range of applications, such as remote repair, training and instruction, disaster/emergency situations, real estate, and many others. More compelling remote collaboration tools can open up new opportunities for people to richly experience remote events and to share personal experiences in a way that audio- and video-based communications cannot achieve. These telecollaboration capabilities can significantly improve opportunities for underdeveloped and underserved communities to participate in location-specific events and activities, including remote medical assessment, remote learning, and participation in situations where travel is prohibitively expensive. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project endeavors to build on prior NSF-funded research to develop compelling, user-centered technologies that support remote collaboration in contexts where the physical space around the user is important to the interaction. The research plan focuses on two specific aspects that have not been addressed in prior work but are important to commercialization of the technology: initialization of the spatial modeling and handling of dynamic scenes. The proposal suggests plausible solutions and details plans to explore individual solutions and combinations for both problems, in order to provide users with a system that requires minimal additional effort or focus to employ. The results of the proposed research include a solution path for both of these key issues and a prototype system that implements remote spatial-based collaboration without encumbering the users with system-level details, while allowing them to focus on the tasks at hand.