Reality portals

Through interactive augmented virtuality we provide the ability to interactively explore a remote space inside a virtual environment. This paper presents a tool and technique that can be used to create such virtual worlds that are augmented by video textures taken of real world objects. The system constructs and updates, in near real-time, a representation of the user-defined salient and relevant features of the real world. This technique has the advantage of constructing a virtual world that contains the relevant video-data of the real world, while maintaining the flexibility of a virtual world. The virtual-real world representation is not dependent on physical location and can be manipulated in a way not subject to the temporal, spatial, and physical constraints found in the real world. Another advantage is that spatializing the video-data may afford more intuitive examination.