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As media technologies become increasingly affordable, compact and inherently networked, new generations of
telecollaborative platforms continue to arise which integrate these new affordances. Virtual reality has been primarily
concerned with creating simulations of environments that can transport participants to real or imagined spaces that
replace the “real world”. Meanwhile Augmented Reality systems have evolved to interleave objects from Virtual Reality
environments into the physical landscape. Perhaps now there is a new class of systems that reverse this precept to
enhance dynamic media landscapes and immersive physical display environments to enable intuitive data exploration
through collaboration. Vroom (Virtual Room) is a next-generation reconfigurable tiled display environment in development at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. Vroom enables freely scalable digital collaboratories, connecting distributed, high-resolution visualization resources for collaborative work in the sciences, engineering and the arts. Vroom transforms a physical space into an immersive media environment with large format interactive display surfaces, video teleconferencing and spatialized audio built on a highspeed optical network backbone. Vroom enables group collaboration for local and remote participants to share knowledge and experiences. Possible applications include: remote learning, command and control, storyboarding, post-production editorial review, high resolution video playback, 3D visualization, screencasting and image, video and multimedia file sharing. To support these various scenarios, Vroom features support for multiple user interfaces (optical tracking, touch UI, gesture interface, etc.), support for directional and spatialized audio, giga-pixel image interactivity, 4K video streaming, 3D visualization and telematic production. This paper explains the design process that has been utilized to make Vroom an accessible and intuitive immersive environment for remote collaboration specifically for digital cinema production.
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