Video communication is filtering into everyday use. Television is becoming more social, videoconferencing happens in the living room and beyond, and games are played with others remotely. The confluence of social networking, multimedia, and computer-mediated interaction is radically reshaping social communication, bringing new challenges and opportunities. One key challenge ahead is to move from current static solutions (e.g., "talking heads") to truly natural and immersive experiences. In this talk we provide an overview of the present state of the art through a few examples and discuss future possibilities and challenges. In particular, we will concentrate on two representative future application areas: performing arts and personal communication. In the former, we will explore how distributed stages can be linked, so artists at different locations can perform together at the same time the same song, act or play. In the latter, we will discuss our continuous efforts on the provision of 3D tele-immersion environments that offer a common virtual room for friends or family members to hangout. As we will show in this talk, current challenges associated to immersive media experience require multi-disciplinary solutions.

Pablo Cesar leads Distributed and Interactive Systems group (http://www.dis.cwi.nl) at CWI (The National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands). Pablo's research focuses on modelling and controlling complex collections of media objects (including real-time media and sensor data) that are distributed in time and space. His fundamental interest is in understanding how different customizations of such collections affect the user experience. Pablo is the PI of a Public Private Partnership project (2014-2016) with Xinhuanet and participates as PI as well in very successful EU-funded projects like REVERIE and Vconect. He has (co)-authored over 100 articles. He is member of the editorial board of, among others, ACM Transactions on Multimedia (TOMM). Pablo has given tutorials about multimedia systems in prestigious conferences such as ACM Multimedia, CHI, and the WWW conference. He acted as an invited expert at the European Commission's Future Media Internet Architecture Think Tank and participates in standardisation activities at MPEG (point-cloud compression) and ITU (QoE for multi-party tele-meetings).

More information: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~garcia/