Over the past two decades, Multimedia has progressed significantly. Traditionally, the term “media” referred to entities such as audio, video, text, images, and graphics. New media; however, are emerging, such as holography, haptics, eSmell, eTaste, and even eThought. Most of these new media are considered to be within the larger context of Virtual Reality - the technology that provides synthetic yet believable experiences in a computer-generated environment. It achieves this by using the entire spectrum of both traditional and new multimedia technologies and by providing the 3 ‘I’s: immersion, interactivity and information intensity. Immersion comes from devices that isolate the senses sufficiently to make a person feel transported to another place. Interactivity comes from the computer’s ability to change the scene’s point of view in a naturally interactive manner. Finally, Information intensity is the notion that a virtual world can offer special quality such as telepresence or entities with intelligent behavior. Depending on the specific application, a number of subcategories of synthetic environments can be defined. Some of these are Virtual Presence, Telepresence, and Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). In this document, we refer to the set that encompasses these three categories as Collaborative Virtual Presence. Virtual Presence tries to give the impression to the user as if the user is present in one place or environment, even when one is physically not situated in that environment; e.g., immersing in the Roman Coliseum to the extent that the user believes he/she is really present in the coliseum. Tele-presence itself is really a special case of Virtual Presence, where the user and the virtual location are geographically distributed; e.g., manipulating a hazardous object in a nuclear reactor from a safe location. As such, telepresence is a networked paradigm by nature since there is a need for transmission of data between remote sites. A CVE, one of the most challenging of VR categories, is a shared virtual world that allows its users to collaborate in the synthetic world, performing shared object manipulation and other collaborative tasks; e.g., collaborative design and tele-surgery.
Research on Collaborative Virtual Presence, and Multimedia in general, is inherently interdisciplinary. Interactions between researchers in Multimedia and computer graphics have a long tradition because Multimedia research started within the field of computer graphics. One of the major challenges in computer graphics and Multimedia is content generation which is addressed by the confluence of video processing and computer graphics. Additionally, research on computer haptics is gaining momentum while only “the first steps into a vast field” have been taken. Research on the creation of multimedia content including computer graphics, video processing and haptic rendering will benefit from the experience of the multimedia community with synchronization issues and networking. The proposed research on Collaborative Virtual Presence aims to exploit the potential of these interdisciplinary fields; the applicants have a background in all the corresponding areas. Computer-generated worlds in general have been a subject of interest for many years, yet many challenges remain. Recently, the ACM Special Interest Group in Multimedia agreed that there are 3 “grand challenges” in this field for the next decades to come. One of those challenges is “to make interactions with remote people and environments nearly the same as interactions with local people and environments”. This grand challenge incorporates two problems: distributed collaboration and interactive, immersive three-dimensional environments. It also suggests that in addition to solving the distributed collaboration problem inherent in the challenge, research must also be conducted to address the promise of interactions with remote people, places, and virtual environments, using sensors (e.g., touch, smell, taste, motion, etc.) and output devices (e.g., large immersive displays and personal displays integrated with eye glasses) that offer the opportunity for more intimate and sensitive interaction with a remote environment.
It is the aim of this research application to acquire equipments that are necessary to perform research in the above-described area of Collaborative Virtual Presence. Clearly, this is an area that will be both challenging and important for many years to come, leading to innovative results with high impact on both technology and society itself. In this context, the applicants will target the following areas: modelling, communications, and applications.