MURRAY HILL, N.J. — Telepresence over the Internet will soon be available with a live, remotely operated, 360° panoramic camera system devised at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories. The panoramic video camera, called FullView, will be operated over BowieNet with a mouse to control views of concerts.

Using a Java applet communicating over the Internet with a telepresence server and FullView camera, Net surfers can get close to the experience of actually being at a live concert performance.

"We use multiple cameras, all running simultaneously, which together provide enough resolution to pan around the whole scene," said FullView inventor Vic Naiwa, a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs.

Other attempts at full 360° viewing, such as Be Here Corp. (Cupertino, Calif.), use a single camera and a parabolic mirror to capture a 360° scene. "Parabolic mirrors work for non-real-time applications because you can record on film, which has enough resolution to later pan around," Naiwa said. "But a single video camera just can't provide enough resolution for multiple users to simultaneously view in different directions."

The Bell Labs inventor surveyed the available technologies for 360° panoramic cameras several years ago before building FullView. The simplest setup, according to Naiwa, uses a single camera that rotates while taking several images sequentially.

"The rotating camera works fairly well at maintaining a single focal point, if the rotating tripod is well-designed, but any motion in the scene will blur the image," said Naiwa.

Rotating camera setups, such as Apple's QuickTime VR approach, handle still scenes well. But if anything moves in the scene, the rotating camera will show only portions of it on each pass, blurring the image. The solution is to use a parabolic mirror to capture the 360° scene in each frame, but the curvature of the nonplanar mirrors causes astigmatism distortion.

Multiple cameras with fish-eye lenses can eliminate blurring by capturing the whole scene with each frame. That also solves the resolution problem, by taking multiple images. The downside is that it is impossible to mount the cameras close enough together to provide a single focal point.

Naiwa settled on a multiple camera setup that uses pyramidal mirrors positioned with the point of the pyramid facing down. Video cameras — one for each side of the pyramid — are aimed upward at the triangular mirrors. Software then combines the images from the separate cameras into a single, seamless 360° view.

"With a pyramid of mirrors, we have no trouble adjusting the cameras to provide a single focal point. Plus, since the mirrors are planar, they introduce no distortion," Naiwa said.

The main advantages of the multiple-camera setup are high real-time resolution — 3,200 by 480 pixels, streaming off the server at 15 frames/second. There are also inherent disadvantages to a multicamera/pyramidal mirror setup, but Naiwa said they have been largely "engineered out" in FullView. One disadvantage is that, since the cameras are aiming upward toward a downward-facing mirror, a portion of the image contains the cameras themselves. Naiwa remedied that by making the mirrors long enough to just crop out the cameras' own image while maintaining a 60° vertical field of view.

One disadvantage that could not be engineered out was the need to precisely calibrate each camera's position. "Luckily that is a one-time adjustment," Naiwa said.

Bell Labs funded Naiwa to build several prototypes, each smaller than the next. The first was a four-sided pyramid with 120-inch mirrors and four upward-facing standard-sized CCD cameras. The current prototype uses five smaller CCD cameras and a five-sided pyramid of 4-inch mirrors. "The next version I'm working on uses very small, microminiature CCD cameras and even smaller mirrors — under 3 inches," said Naiwa.

The system software exhibits the 360° view in a low-resolution window from which the BowieNet user chooses a portion for enlarging. About a 60° portion of the 360° image can be blown up in the high-resolution close-up window.

A Java applet handles the multiple window environment while communicating with the FullView server to stream the high-resolution portion of the image into the close-up window. For higher speed, a special "Bowie browser" is available.