3D tele-immersive collaborative environments are becoming a reality. The emerging tele-immersive (TI) technology empowers and enables collaborative interactions and a plethora of new applications among geographically distributed sites. TI technology allows creation of a cyber TI room, where geographically separated users can jointly perform physical activities such as dance or exercise. This project is working to take this vision further and allow users to participate in simultaneous TI sessions and to cyber-walk between TI rooms. To achieve the TI rooms vision, the underlying cyber-physical infrastructure must consider both (a) streams of 3D data as a first class object in its design and in its deployment, and (b) holistic end-to-end management of the multi-stream environments for each TI room. Hence, the project is developing a Holistic Multi-stream Environment for Distributed Immersive Applications (H-MEDIA). They will investigate (a) system architectures with correlated multi-streaming; (b) real-time virtualization of resources for resource isolation between individual TI rooms and switching (cyber-walk) between rooms; (c) end-to-end configurable, robust and fault-tolerant virtual networks for different rooms; and (d) adaptive configuration and system management that will yield customizable, stable, adaptable, available and robust individual TI rooms. H-MEDIA research will have impact on communities in computer science and also on medical, social science and other domains. The H-MEDIA project will also result in educational benefits such as involving graduate students research in very novel TI technologies, inclusion of undergraduate students, and impact on education in other disciplines such as new teaching of choreography in TI environments, as well as many others.
