Re:What's so amazing? (Score 1)

The article from New Scientist doesn't do a good job of highlighting the real innovation here. Here's my take...

People have been doing tele-immersion for a long time using virtual worlds and avatars. Scene geometry is normally represented in VRML or some other geometric modelling system. Generating stereo image-pairs from a geometric model at arbitrary points-of-view is easy (or at least well understood).

What these guys are doing is scanning the geometry of a real scene in real-time and transmitting something functionally equivalent to a polygon list plus texture maps to allow the remote user to construct an image from any point of view. As far as I can tell, that's the real innovation.

I see the article defines tele-immersion to exclude synthetic worlds. In my experience the term encompasses any immersive experience that brings together multiple remote participants in a shared virtual space. I don't care who coined the term, it now has a life of its own.