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A teleconferencing apparatus and system consisting of a unitary housing. The housing includes audio and video capture capabilities for capturing video images and spoken audio of a participant in a videoconference; a monitor for displaying visual images associated with at least one participant; audio

A teleconferencing apparatus and system consisting of a unitary housing. The housing includes audio and video capture capabilities for capturing video images and spoken audio of a participant in a videoconference; a monitor for displaying visual images associated with at least one participant; audio and reproduction capabilities; and an adaptive acoustic echo canceler to reduce echo during the reproduction of audio. A plurality of the apparatuses are distributed in the system and interconnected by a first network and a second network. The first network provides an AV path along which AV signals, representing video images and spoken audio of the participants can be carried while the second network provides a data path along which data can be shared among a plurality of participants. The system may also include two monitors, one for displaying the video images of the participants and the other for displaying data shared among the participants.

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A teleconferencing apparatus and system consisting of a unitary housing. The housing includes audio and video capture capabilities for capturing video images and spoken audio of a participant in a videoconference; a monitor for displaying visual images associated with at least one participant; audio

A teleconferencing apparatus and system consisting of a unitary housing. The housing includes audio and video capture capabilities for capturing video images and spoken audio of a participant in a videoconference; a monitor for displaying visual images associated with at least one participant; audio and reproduction capabilities; and an adaptive acoustic echo canceler to reduce echo during the reproduction of audio. A plurality of the apparatuses are distributed in the system and interconnected by a first network and a second network. The first network provides an AV path along which AV signals, representing video images and spoken audio of the participants can be carried while the second network provides a data path along which data can be shared among a plurality of participants. The system may also include two monitors, one for displaying the video images of the participants and the other for displaying data shared among the participants. imensional n-tuples, each n-tuple locally approximating the shape and shade attributes of a portion of the surface of the graphic object, and the n-tuples having a sampling resolution of an image space; and hierarchically projecting the shape and shade information of the octree to an image plane using a plurality of parallel rendering pipelines, the image plane having a selected orientation by traversing the n-tuples of the nodes of the octree from a lowest resolution level to a highest resolution level. 2. The method of claim 1 further comprising the steps of: executing software programs in a uniprocessor to represent the shape and shade attributes of the object in the octree; and projecting the shape and shade attributes in a plurality of parallel processing pipelines coupled to the memory. 3. The method of claim 1 wherein the graphic object is adaptively sampled according to a resolution of the image plane. 4. The method of claim 1 further comprising the steps of: warping the n-tuples in object space to the image plane having an arbitrary selected orientation. 5. The method of claim 4 wherein each n-tuple octree is warped independently. 6. The method of claim 1 further comprising the steps of: projecting a particular n-tuple onto a corresponding pixel of a depth buffer; storing a depth value of the projected n-tuple in the pixel only if the depth value of the projected n-tuple is less than a previously stored depth value of the pixel; constructing a tangential disk at a position of the corresponding n-tuple, the tangential disk having a radius greater than a maximum distance between the n-tuples; projecting the tangential disks onto corresponding subsets of the pixels; and storing depth values of the projected tangential disk in the corresponding subset of pixels only if the depth values of the projected tangential disk are less than the depth values of the corresponding subset of pixels. 7. The method of claim 1 wherein the shade attributes include a plurality of texture mipmaps, and further comprising the steps of: interpolating the plurality of texture mipmaps to determine colors of the n-tuples. 8. The method of claim 7 further comprising the step of: filtering the colors using a filter having a radius equal to where s is the distance between the n-tuples. 9. The method of claim 8 wherein the filtering is dependent a density of the projected n-tuples. 10. The method of claim 6 wherein a resolution of the depth buffer is greater than the resolution of the image plane. 11. An apparatus for rendering a graphic object, comprising: a memory storing shape and shade attributes of a surface of the object, the attributes arranged as an octree in the memory, the octree including a plurality of nodes arranged at a plurality of levels, each node storing a plurality of zero-dimensional n-tuples, each n-tuple locally approximating the shape and shade attributes of a portion of the surface of the graphic object, and the n-tuples having a sampling resolution of an image space; and a plurality of parallel processing pipelines connected the memory, the pipelines projecting the shape and shade information of the octree to an image plane, the image plane having a selected orientation by traversing the n-tuples of the nodes of the octree from a lowest resolution level to a highest resolution level. 12. The apparatus of claim 11 wherein each node is stored as a block, and each pipeline further comprises: a block culling stage; a forward warping stage; a visibility splatting stage; a texture filtering stage; a view dependent shading stage; and an image reconstruction and antialiasing stage. 13. The apparatus of claim 12 wherein the block culling stage uses visibility cones. 14. The apparatus of claim 12 wherein the forward warping stage warps the n-tuples in object space to the image plane having an arbitrary selected orientation. 15. The apparatus of claim 12 wherein each n-tuple octree is w