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Open-Sourcing VR2Gather: A Collaborative Social VR System for Adaptive Multi-Party Real Time Communication

Published: 28 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Social Virtual Reality is envisioned to transform how individuals communicate remotely, offering a sense of immersion and co-presence within a virtual space. Current platforms enabling remote social interactions rely on synthetic user representations. We address this limitation by enabling realistic human representation through volumetric content capture, encoding and transmission. Specifically, we present an extended version of VR2Gather, now a fully open source Unity package, available at https://github.com/cwi-dis/VR2Gather-acmmm-oss. Our platform is a customisable system to transmit volumetric content in a multi-party real-time environment, easy to integrate into existing applications.

Supplemental Material

MP4 File - oss0006-video.mp4
This video introduces the main features of the VR2Gather platform. It introduces the concept of Social VR and highlights the fact that VR2Gather employs volumetric real-time point cloud representations of users. It presents the components of the system that are responsible for point cloud acquisition, registration and compression as well as the components responsible for facilitating communication and data transmission over the Internet. The project was realised by the DIS group at CWI in Amsterdam with the help of open source contributors on Github and financial support from the European Union. The project is available at https://github.com/cwi-dis/vr2gather.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MM '24: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia
October 2024
11719 pages
ISBN:9798400706868
DOI:10.1145/3664647
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 October 2024

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Author Tags

  1. communication system
  2. open source software
  3. real-time volumetric capture
  4. realistic point clouds
  5. social virtual reality

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  • Research-article

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  • HORIZON EUROPE

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MM '24
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MM '24: The 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia
October 28 - November 1, 2024
Melbourne VIC, Australia

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MM '24 Paper Acceptance Rate 1,150 of 4,385 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,145 of 8,556 submissions, 25%

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