Visual teleconferencing apparatus

摘要

An audio/visual conference station that includes a panoramic lens to capture an image of the panoramic scene surrounding the lens. The station also includes communication mechanisms to compress the panoramic image for transmission to a remote audio/visual conference station for display. Thus, people around the remote audio/visual conference station are able to both hear and see those at the local audio/visual conference station and vice versa. The audio/visual conference stations can also communicate through a server system to increase the number of visual conference stations exchanging or sharing images. In addition the server system can off-load some of the image processing steps from the visual conference stations.