TWISTER (Telexistence Wide-angle Immersive STEReoscope) is an immersive full-color autostereoscopic display, designed for a face-to-face telecommunication system called “mutual telexistence”, where people in distant locations can communicate as if they were in the same virtual three dimensional space. developing a system named “mutual telexistence” which allows for face-to-face communication between remote users. Unlike most conventional tele-conferencing systems which limit the users’ viewpoint to a fixed position, mutual telexistence system should provide the images of the other users corresponding to the change of a user’s eye position in the computer generated three-dimensional space.

On the other hand, the technique called “image-based rendering” has emerged recently. By using this technique, complex photo-realistic images at arbitrary viewpoint can be effectively synthesized. Fundamentally employing this technique, however, our system must synthesize the image in real-time for smooth communication. Thus, our prototype system has the following features to fulfill this “real-time” request:

Geometric information such as a “depth map” is needless. (Only one parameter of the object’s distance is required.) So, our system doesn’t have time-consuming process such as pattern matching.
The data which is processed by the rendering computer is reduced in advance at the stage of capturing the source images. This means that the rendering computer doesn’t have to deal with bulky data of the “plenoptic function.”
Fast rendering is possible by making use of graphic hardware acceleration of texture mapping. That is to say, this system is assembled by relatively low-cost general graphic hardware.

http://www.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/mutel/