This project establishes a new Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site that is jointly hosted by the Department of Computer Science and the Creative Media Industries Institute at Georgia State University. Undergraduate students across the nation will work with a group of experienced faculty members and conduct cutting-edge research in immersive media computing during each summer. Immersive media computing is an emerging computing paradigm that aims to create the sensation of 3D immersion in a real or virtual environment. The recent development of immersive media computing has enabled a host of compelling technologies such as 360-degree videos, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality, potentially transforming a wide spectrum of sectors in healthcare, training, education, entertainment, tourism, etc. The REU site will train undergraduate students in this emerging computing paradigm and benefit their graduate application and job hunting. Through various activities such as seminars, demos, presentations, field trips, and other professional development opportunities, undergraduate students will also enhance their professional skills. This REU site aims to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in research activities, especially in the neighboring regions with numerous Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Women Colleges.
The emerging nature of immersive media computing leads to the strong intellectual merit of this project. Despite the rich history of research on regular images and videos, the computing of immersive content poses significant research challenges. New algorithms will be developed to address five research problems across the end-to-end immersive media computing system: (1) immersive content must be compressed to reduce the amount of data transported while maintaining the fidelity of the content; (2) the compressed immersive content needs to be streamed to the remote display in a bandwidth-efficient way; (3) the received immersive content should be quickly rendered based on the user head orientation using parallel computing in CPUs/GPUs; (4) the raw immersive content must be further analyzed to extract the events of interest; and (5) additional information needs to be overlaid over the immersive content to enhance the immersive visualization experience. In addition to algorithm and model designs, real-world systems will be built to demonstrate the effectiveness of the research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
