About this Research Topic

Background

The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced a profound change in the way that people interact with each other. In particular, remote and distributed collaboration has become the prevailing and even dominant form as it is the mere option that provides safe and effective communication without physical contact. Though the virus might eventually be defeated in the future, the remote lifestyle could be a permanent change as the outcome of this long-lasting and global-scale pandemic. Many tech companies have announced policies for supporting permanent work-from-home. Such a trend of advocating boundaryless connection has also inspired the surge of the metaverse - a virtual 3D world that bridges people without physical constraints. With all these being said, we are living in a world where digital and virtual assets are becoming much more prominent and valuable. Hence, research on developing advanced techniques for telepresence and digital humans in virtual reality is an important future avenue.

The goal for this research topic is to tackle problems within high-quality 3D assets generation and rendering specific to remote communication such as digital humans, 3D scenes, etc, that can enhance the performance of telepresence and can be deployed in virtual or augmented reality.

The proposed techniques should be able to improve remote immersive communication. This should be demonstrated by case studies, experimental studies, demonstrations that show how the techniques have improved remote immersive communication. So submitted articles must demonstrably be oriented towards the improvement of remote communication. Areas that may be studied to improve remote communication include, but are not limited to:
1) improve the 3D modeling/reconstruction accuracy in terms of geometry quality; 2) improve the textured appearance of 3D objects; 3) provide a more easily accessible manner of generating 3D assets by lowering the requirement of input; 4) improve rendering quality of 3D humans and scenes; 5) lower-cost rendering on commodity devices with limited resources; 6) technique for streaming 3D content in limited bandwidth; 7) privacy for VR/AR telepresence.

We welcome original research papers on the impact of the following areas on the improvement of remote immersive communication:
1. Digital human generation and reconstruction
2. 3D object/scene modeling and reconstruction
3. Neural rendering
4. 3D animation
5. Teleportation system
6. Neural shape editing
7. Rendering in systems with limited resources
8. Privacy for VR telepresence

Keywords: virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D assets, telepresence, digital human

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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