Nov 02, 2009 — See New Scientist magazine
A theme-park animatronic trick could allow people act more naturally in videoconferences.
Shader lamps is a technique that projects an animated face that looks three-dimensional onto a dummy's blank face. Now the trick has been exploited to project a person's features onto a animatronic double somewhere else.
The video in this New Scientist article shows the animatronic shader-lamps avatar demonstrated by a comedian at a recent conference. The system has a number of advantages over conventional screen-based video conferencing, says Greg Welch, the computer scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill leading the project with his colleague Henry Fuchs.
