Mobile Virtual Participation in a Distributed Meeting Using an Omni-directional Camera System Seamus Hickey*, Kari Kuutti* Sami Ahola** *Dept of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu **Dept. of Computer Engineering, University of Oulu Introduction One of the focus areas in the research on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has been the support for distributed meetings. The range of technological sophistication of support systems has varied from simple desktop conferences with "talking heads" to full immersion virtual reality meetings (Greenhalgh & Benford 1995). Until recently, the point of access has been fixed systems such as workstations or desktop computers and very little attention has focused on support for mobile participants (Luff & Heath 1998). Research and standardisation of 3 rd generation mobile services (UMTS) is likely to facilitate data rates up to 2 Mbps for indoor systems and 384kbps for outdoor (Berruto et al. 1998) by 2002. The combination of these high data rates, increasingly sophisticated electronics and the added benefit of mobility, should encourage the development of advanced services based on mobility and multimedia applications (Munro et al. 1998). It is conceivable that a future mobile terminal, like CyPhone (Pulli et al. 1998) could support Virtual Reality (VR) devices enabling services based on Augmented Reality and Telepresence (Pyssysalo 1998). One such service is a distributed VR Meeting Room service. As part of the PAULA project we are developing a meeting room environment, which will allow a mobile user to remotely participate in a real meeting which they cannot physically attend. This service uses telepresence to provide a sense of immersion and presence for the mobile user in the meeting room. To provide the telepresence aspect of the S. Hickey, K. Kuutti, and S. Ahola, ``Mobile Virtual Participation in a Distributed Meeting Using an Omni-directional Camera System,'' in 8th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI '99), vol. 2, pp. 533-537, 1999. Seamus conclussions about the Omni-directional camera and tele-presence based meetings. ISBN: 08058 3392 7.