The Microsoft Research Team is all set to take your video call to another level. A new project Room2Room based on augmented reality will soon let you see the digital image of the person you are on a video call with. You can now see the whole life-sized 3D image of the person in your room instead of the small chat head on your screen which means that two people on video call can see the actual image of each other sitting across them.

Room2Room from Microsoft Research

“Room2Room is a life-size telepresence system that leverages projected augmented reality to enable co-present interaction between two remote participants. Our solution recreates the experience of a face-to-face conversation by performing 3D capture of the local user with color + depth cameras and projecting their virtual copy into the remote space at life-size scale”, says Microsoft Research Team.

Room2Room project uses digital projectors and Kinect depth cameras to capture the image of a person and project its life-sized 3D version in real time. The project is still in the pipeline and there is no set date announced by the team for its launch. The team will be submitting the paperwork of the project at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference in San Francisco at the end of February.

Room2Room project can actually be termed as a successor of Microsoft’s existing project RoomAlive which is a proof-of-concept prototype which can transform any room into an immersive, augmented, magical entertainment experience and let users shoot, touch and steer the projected content with their real physical environment.

Taking advantage of their existing RoomAlive project, Microsoft Research Team conducted a study with seven pairs of participants on the video call where they checked the formation of 3D shape and the time taken. The team used two set-ups of RoomAlive to scan the two participants in a video call sitting in each room and project them to each other. The study was basically conducted to compare the results of this three-dimensional actual video chat with the regular video chat.

Read more about the project.