On May 22^nd, FITCE.be organized its second event of 2008.

Around 20 people from different kind of companies, service providers and universities participated to this FITCE.be afternoon session at the premises of Cisco Systems in Diegem.

 

Goal of the event was to cover the concepts and theory behind the upcoming next-generation of immersive virtual meeting rooms, also called Telepresence solutions.

These solutions offer an immersive meeting experience to people remotely located, delivering a feeling of having the meeting virtually together, face to face, in the same room.

 

Ir. José Van Ooteghem, president of FITCE Belgium welcomed the attendants, after which Ir. Frank De Reymaeker presented the agenda.

 

We had two very interesting lectures:

A first lecture “Concepts and Theory behind Immersive Environments”, given by Christof Van Nimwegen, Senior Researcher at the Center For Usability Research (CUO) of the IBBT / Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, covered the theoretical background behind immersive solutions.

The CUO pursues the design of user-friendly applications and as such evaluates and analyses the users-friendliness of applications. Regarding immersive environments, CUO investigates the factors influencing the way people interact and the aspects that influence the immersive character of solutions and create a feeling of presence. After delivering a definition of “immersion” and an overview of the different types of immersion (visual, auditive, strategic, literal, tactical, narrative …), Mr. Van Nimwegen covered the factors that contribute to experiencing immersion through examples of available solutions and ongoing research (ex. 3D audio research at VUB ETRO). 
All these concepts led to a definition of a good telepresence strategy which should be clearly aimed at putting human factors first, focusing on visual collaboration that approximates the brain’s innate preferences for interpersonal communications, separating from the unnatural “talking heads” experience of traditional videoconferencing. 
These factors include life-size participants, fluid motion, accurate flesh tones and the appearance of true eye contact, among other things. Considerations around the degree of realism required for immersive experience dependant on the applications, as well as around the future of immersive technologies ended this very interesting lecture.

 

The second lecture, “A real life example of an immersive environment: the Cisco Telepresence solution”, delivered by Ir. Thierry De Meulemeester, Consulting Systems Engineer at Cisco Systems was aimed at providing a view of the technology behind telepresence solutions. 
A first part of the lecture explained how the human factors described in the first lecture, can be obtained in a real life setup: which screens, codecs, furniture and environmental aspects and standard protocols are required. 
An extensive overview was delivered on how standard protocols such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), XML (Extensible Markup Language) and RTP (Real Time Protocol) perform call control and session setup. The lecture then detailed the requirements of Telepresence solutions towards the network in terms of bandwidth and latency.

 

The two lectures were followed by a “Question and Answer” session, after which the president of FITCE Belgium thanked the speakers for their excellent lectures and the audience for their interest and participation.

He expressed the hope to be able to welcome everybody at some future event of FITCE Belgium and invited all participants to a reception.

 

During this reception, attendees had the opportunity to participate in a real Telepresence session between the Cisco Diegem and Cisco Amsterdam site.

 

Presentations:

 

Lecture 1: “Concepts and Theory behind Immersive environments”, by Christof Van Nimwegen, Senior Researcher - Center For Usability Research (CUO) – K.U.Leuven

Lecture 2: “A real life example of an immersive environment : the Cisco Telepresence solution” by Thierry De Meulemeester, Consulting Systems Engineer Cisco Systems