04-01-2011, 04:54 PM
By:
KANNAN K M
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INTRODUCTION
Tele Immersion is a new medium that enables a user to share a virtual space with remote participants. The user is immersed in a 3D world that is transmitted from a remote site. This medium for human interaction, enabled by digital technology, approximates the illusion that a person is in the same physical space as others, even though they may be thousands of miles distant.In a tele-immersive environment computers recognize the presence and movements of individuals and objects, track those individuals and images, and then permit them to be projected in realistic, multiple, geographically distributed immersive environments on stereo-immersive surfaces.Tele-immersion techniques can be viewed as the building blocks of the office of tomorrow, where several users from across the country will be able to collaborate as if they're all in the same room. Scaling up, transmissions could incorporate larger scenes, like news conferences, ballet performances, or sports events. With mobile rather than stationary camera arrays, viewers could establish tele-presence in remote or hazardous situations. Properly, for instance, in today’s video-conferencing systems, because the camera and the display screen cannot be in the same spot. This usually leads to a deadened and formal affect in interactions, eye contact being a nearly ubiquitous subconscious method of affirming trust. Furthermore, participants aren’t able to establish a sense of position relative to one another and therefore haven clear way to direct attention, approval or disapproval.Teleimmersion, a new medium for human interaction enabled by digital technologies, approximates the illusion that a user is in the same physical space as other people, even though the other participants might in fact be hundreds or thousands of miles away. It combines the display and interaction techniques of virtual reality with new vision technologies that transcend the traditional limitations of a camera. Rather than merely observing people and their immediate environment from one vantage point, teleimmersion stations convey them as “moving sculptures,” point of view. The result is that all the participants, however distant, can share and explore a life-size space. Beyond improving on videoconferencing, teleimmersion was conceived as an ideal application for driving network-engineering research, specifically for Internet2, the primary research consortium for advanced network studies in the U.S. If a computer network can support teleimmersion, it can probably support any other application. This is because teleimmersion demands as little delay as possible from flows of information (and as little inconsistency in delay), in addition to the more common demands for very large and reliable flows .
SCIENCE OF TELE-IMMERSION
Tele-Immersion has an environment called TIDE. TIDE stands for Tele-Immersive Data exploration Environment. The goal of TIDE is to employ Tele-Immersion techniques to create a persistent environment in which collaborators around the world can engage in long-term exploration and analysis of massive scientific data-sets. When participants are tele-immersed, they are able to see and interact with each other and objects in a shared virtual environment. Their presence will be depicted by life-like representations of themselves (avatars) that are generated by real-time, image capture, and modeling techniques. The environment will persist even when all the participants have left it. The environment may autonomously control supercomputing computations, query databases and gather the results for visualization when the participants return. Participants may even leave messages for their colleagues who can then replay them as a full audio, video and gestural stream.
All users are separated by hundreds of miles but appear collocated able to see each other as either a video image or as a simplified virtual representation (commonly known as an avatar). Each avatar has arms and hands so that they may convey natural gesture such as pointing at areas of interest in the visualization. Digital audio is streamed between the sites to allow them to speak to each other. TIDE will engage users in CAVEs, ImmersaDesks and desktop workstations around the world connected by the Science and Technology Transit Access Point (STARTAP) - a system of high speed national and international networks. TIDE
