Electrical and computer engineering faculty members Sanjay J. Patel, Minh N. Do, and Wen-mei W. Hwu and alumni Dennis Lin (MSCompE '04, PhD '11) and Quang Nguyen (MSECE '09) are working to revolutionize video communication and collaboration. Personify, a company they founded in 2009, has since launched Personify Live, a product that immerses users in a shared space, adding a new dimension to video conferencing, collaboration, and presentations.
Written by
Electrical and computer engineering faculty members Sanjay J. Patel, Minh N. Do, and Wen-mei W. Hwu and alumni Dennis Lin (MSCompE '04, PhD '11) and Quang Nguyen (MSECE '09) are working to revolutionize video communication and collaboration. Personify, a company they founded in 2009, has since launched Personify Live, a product that immerses users in a shared space, adding a new dimension to video conferencing, collaboration, and presentations.
Personify, formerly Nuvixa, creates products that enhance the way people communicate via video for online meetings, on-line training and education, desktop telepresence, and video chat.
Personify Live superimposes a video image of Sanjay Patel onto the PC desktop.
Personify Live superimposes a video image of Sanjay Patel onto the PC desktop.
“Video calling is about creating a sense of connectedness with the other participants,” said Sanjay Patel, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois and Personify CEO. “Putting everyone into a common environment along with the content they are sharing significantly improves the online experience.”
Personify technology operates with new sensor technologies, such as the Microsoft Kinect for Windows Sensor. Personify uses the extra information from the sensor, or depth, to create a computational video platform that brings new features to video communication that would otherwise be difficult with traditional imaging sensors, such as real-time user segmentation –identifying the human from the physical environment and then cutting the human out of the scene.
Personify Chat immerses users into a shared space.
Personify Chat immerses users into a shared space.
Personify’s technology is able to pull the video image of the user from their physical environment and superimpose them onto the PC desktop, allowing the user to interact with their content and thus engage their audience.
The company plans to launch a new product, Personify Chat, in the near future. Personify Chat is a video calling application for the desktop. Personify Chat builds on the Intel Perceptual Computing Platform to make visual communication more natural and engaging. Personify Chat also eliminates the visibility of physical backgrounds so that users can be immersed in a shared space, like a desktop. The application allows users to share browser windows and view the same content – a simple and effective way to collaborate.
“We are seeing great potential for the company right now,” Patel said. “We are getting a lot of interest from large enterprises for our product, along with partnership opportunities from larger vendors in the video communication space. This is the future of how people will communication with video.”
____________________
Contact: Brad Petersen, associate director of external relations, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 217/244-6376.
Writer: Gabrielle Irvin, ECE ILLINOIS
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.