Advancing Video Collaboration And Augmented Reality Through Wireless, Edge, And Cloud

Video conferencing was invented several decades ago, and fortunately technology advances have improved the quality, economics, and accessibility making it widely available during the pandemic. While current video conferencing is immensely valuable, it is still not a replacement for in-person collaboration. Challenges include un-naturalness because of lack of eye-contact and gaze awareness, and the inability to seamlessly collaborate on a shared surface as typically occurs in-person on a white board or sheet of paper. Further along the spectrum of collaboration is Augmented Reality (AR), which in principle can be incorporated in many everyday activities, with the potential to augment human intelligence and productivity. AR still has many challenges, and in addition to user experience issues there are the cost, weight, power and capability limitations of AR headsets. Furthermore, most current AR applications are largely single user, however the ability to have natural collaboration across multiple users can benefit many valuable use cases. This talk will discuss some of the key challenges to be overcome in the above areas, and how industry advances in ICASSP’s core areas and adjacent areas such as sensors, wireless networking, edge and cloud compute can help overcome these challenges, enable improved capabilities, and change the economics and accessibility to make them as practical and widely used as video conferencing is today.