Compositing Video Streams for Geometric Consistency
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional video conferencing systems fail to effectively preserve social nonverbal communication cues and create a sense of co-presence among participants by not integrating remote participants into a geometrically consistent environment, leading to separate and uncoordinated video windows that disrupt accurate interpretation of facial expressions and spatial relationships.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of a unified meeting space view that blends video streams into a coordinated meeting space with a common layout, using source-side and receive-side compositing to align video streams with a meeting background, maintaining geometric consistency and relative positioning, thereby creating a shared virtual space that simulates in-person collaboration.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If separate video windows are used to display remote participants, then multiple participants can be shown simultaneously, but geometric consistency and spatial relationships are lost disrupting accurate interpretation of facial expressions and body language
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple separate video streams into a single composited video stream by integrating them into a common virtual meeting space with consistent geometric relationships. This combining approach maintains the ability to display multiple participants while establishing proper spatial alignment and perspective consistency across all video feeds, thereby preserving nonverbal communication cues.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a virtual meeting space as an intermediary environment that receives and coordinates multiple video streams. This virtual space acts as a mediator that applies geometric transformations and perspective adjustments to each video stream, ensuring they all conform to a consistent spatial framework before being presented to the user.
2Adaptability or versatility
If conventional video conferencing systems are used, then remote communication is enabled, but social nonverbal communication cues are not preserved reducing effective social interaction
Solution Approach 1:
The patent transitions from displaying video streams in separate two-dimensional windows to integrating them into a unified three-dimensional virtual meeting space. This dimensional transformation allows participants to be positioned with proper spatial relationships, preserving body language, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues that are lost in conventional flat window arrangements.
3Ease of operation
If video streams are composited onto a background, then a unified meeting space is created improving social collaboration, but system complexity increases due to source-side and receive-side compositing operations
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the compositing operation into distinct segments: source-side compositing that occurs at the remote endpoint and receive-side compositing that occurs at the local endpoint. This segmentation allows each system to perform only the necessary processing for its role, reducing overall system complexity while still achieving the unified meeting space effect.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods and apparatus for compositing multiple video streams onto a background image having at least one object while keeping at least one of a proper perspective, order, and substantial alignment to the object of the multiple video streams based on the rules of a common layout. The background is defined as a meeting space that fills in gaps between the multiple video streams with appropriate structure of the object. The background creates the context of the meeting space.