Spatialized teleconferencing: Recording and 'squeezed' rendering of multiple distributed sites

Teleconferencing systems are becoming increasing realistic and pleasant for users to interact with geographically distant meeting participants. Video screens display a complete view of the remote participants, using technology such as wraparound or multiple video screens. However, the corresponding audio does not offer the same sophistication: often only a mono or stereo track is presented. This paper proposes a teleconferencing audio recording and playback paradigm that captures the spatial location of the geographically distributed participants for rendering of the remote soundfields at the users' end. Utilizing standard 5.1 surround sound playback, this paper proposes a surround rendering approach that 'squeezes' the multiple recorded soundfields from remote teleconferencing sites to assist the user to disambiguate multiple speakers from different participating sites.