Holographic communication becomes reality with Mimesys and Intel®

Imagine talking with someone on the other side of the planet as if they were on the other side of the table and interacting with documents or virtual objects together – this is precisely what the futuristic communication and collaboration solution from Mimesys enables you to do.

The use cases are manifold, for instance brainstorming meetings (with a white board, Post-It notes and PowerPoint presentations), demonstrations between customers and suppliers (potentially involving objects that are difficult to transport), training in sectors such as medicine (with hands-on exercises), or virtual viewings of planned apartments.

This is not just one technological demonstration relying on an invaluable prototype. All this is made possible by state-of-the-art technologies that are already available or will be by next year. Indeed, the holographic communication solution from Mimesys makes use of:

• Two to four Intel® RealSense™ D415 depth-sensing cameras, enabling each participant to be captured in 3D. “The Intel RealSense sensors are impressive devices in a convenient form factor”, explains Davy Loots, co-founder and CTO of Mimesys, “they are the ideal sensor for our application of volumetrically capturing people in real time. They produce high-quality, high-definition depth and color images that we use to generate the human holograms.”

• Laptops equipped with powerful 8th- or 9th-generation Intel® Core™ i7 or Core ™ i9 processors which transform the large mass of data from multiple cameras into 3D models. “The amount of data collected every second by these sensors is enormous. With the power of the latest Intel processors, we can process and compress this data at 60 frames per second”, Davy Loots elaborates.
• Magic Leap One augmented reality headset. These glasses are decked out with technology (you will even find an Intel® MAX® 10 FPGA component inside), with transparent screens equipped for computer vision, embedding the virtual within the real with 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF). They allow each participant to see their conversation partner behind the table, while hand-held controllers enable them to handle documents or objects placed on the table.
• And tomorrow, 5G will open up holographic communication to mobility, with its speeds comparable to those of fiber-optic connections and, above all, its ultra-low latency – at just one millisecond. “Mixed reality is one of the most demanding applications, requiring ultra-low latency, high speeds, and consistent service quality”, explains Eric Mazières, Head of Mobile Telecommunications Operators at Intel France. “By meeting all these requirements, 5G will enable new services to emerge that the 4G, DSL or even fiber-optic networks do not support.”

Profoundly human and ecological applications

Mimesys’s solution is intended to promote very specific applications inspired by deeply humanistic and ecological considerations.

“Online collaboration tools like Slack often miss the human element in a conversation. Not all subtleties of intentions and human emotions can be expressed in emoticons”, Davy Loots observes. “Traditional videoconferencing solutions like Skype still maintain a certain distance between the conversation partners in a figurative sense because they still don’t put people in the same physical space. This limits the engagement and immersion during the meeting with negative impact on the efficiency of meetings.” But with holographic communication, “Mimesys puts your partner in the same physical space and allows you to interact with shared content in the familiar 3D world we live in, greatly improving the feeling of engagement while maintaining all the nuances of body language.”

For his part, Rémi Rousseau, co-founder and CEO of Mimesys, refers to the environmental benefits, explaining: “Having a real alternative to being in the same room could have a great environmental impact.” And Davy Loots adds: “We still see people flying or driving for hours for business meetings, which has a huge environmental cost. The fact that people still do it though is a sign that the digital communication tools that are available today are inadequate. People simply don’t have the feeling that they’ve really met someone after seeing them in a video conference.”

That is why Mimesy has devised a solution to emulate “the richness of a face-to-face exchange” remotely.

“Think of the Star Trek Holodeck”

Mimesys has great ambitions for the future. Currently, the solution is tailored for one-on-one discussions, but the start-up founders aim to increase the recording volume. “One of our long-term goals is being able to capture larger spaces, like entire rooms, or even stages or tennis and basketball courts”, Davy Loots elaborates. Rémi Rousseau gushes, “Capturing a room will be a big milestone for Mimesys as it will enable real teleportation spaces. Think of the Star Trek Holodeck.”

And Davy Loots concludes: “This might seem far off at the moment, but at the rate we’ve seen the technology progress in the past years, it might be sooner than you think!”

A brief visualization of the Mimesys realtime 3D reconstruction achieved using 4 x Intel® RealSense™ depth D415 cameras on a single PC

Plus d’informations
Mimesys
Intel® MAX® 10 FPGA
Intel® Core ® i7 , Core ® i9
Intel® realsense ™
Intel 5G

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(Publi-reportage)