VR Conferencing: communicating and collaborating in photo-realistic social immersive environments

While Virtual Reality applications become more multi-user experiences, mostly artificial avatars are used for the representation of users in the virtual environment. This is fine for many multi-user scenarios but is less than ideal in more social settings like talking to your family, friends or business partners. In this paper, we like to outline the concept of Social VR based on real-time photorealistic capture and representation of users. Particularly, we introduce our web-based framework that allows for both the creation and consumption of photo-realistic social VR in 3D and 360-degree environments. Further, we evaluated our system both in a 360-degree remote collaborative meeting and in a full 3D experience. Our initial results indicate that our photorealistic approach indeed offers a natural communication to the users with a high presence and immersion. With our system we do not only allow to explore, and experience VR together but also allow new forms of remote communication and collaboratio