There is something incredibly right about the vision George Lucas showed us back in 1977. Displays that hover in the air between us promise a world that privileges face to face communication -- a far more human-centric vision than our current reality, in which we spend our days staring into computer screens.
Such holographic displays are not yet practical, but one day they will be. Meanwhile, through real-time video chat enhanced by capture of gestures and head positions via depth cameras, we can start to experience -- and design for -- that future.
We will describe and demo our system, ARCADE, that creates the appearance of a holographic projection floating between people in a live video chat, and allows those people to enhance their communication by interacting with objects in this virtual projection. There are immediate applications in educational settings and for increasing the power of live multi-way video communication.
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