Mitchell Trott

Title:  Immersive Communication

Date:  November 10, 2011 at 3 p.m., in SF1105

If you would like to meet with Dr. Trott, please contact Professor Adve:  rsadve@comm.utoronto.ca

Abstract:  Video conferencing is now ubiquitous, enabled for example by Skype and iChat. Yet we continue to travel great distances to gather in person. Why? We argue that today’s systems fall far short of providing the sense of effortless connectedness of a face-to-face meeting: They fail to be immersive. Immersive communication has sparked popular imagination for many years, witnessed for example by Star Wars’ holographic Jedi council meetings and The Matrix. In this presentation we review the history of immersive communication and describe attributes needed to achieve a sense immersion. We further describe technical advances that lie on road to immersive communication, including lightfield displays, 3D depth sensors, and multichannel audio. Some of these improvements are within our grasp while others will require enormous advances in multimedia signal processing, computation, and our understanding of human perception, all of which remain rich and active areas of research.

Bio:  Mitchell D. Trott received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in systems engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, in 1987 and 1988, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 1992. He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, from 1992 until 1998, and Director of Research at ArrayComm, Inc., San Jose, CA, from 1997 through 2002. He is an IEEE Fellow and is now a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, where he leads the Seamless Collaboration project. His research interests include streaming media systems, multimedia collaboration, multi-user and wireless communication, and information theory.