National Tele-Immersion Initiative:

Amela Sadagic, PhD amela@advanced.org

Towards Compelling Tele-Immersive Collaborative Environments

Herman Towles , Jaron Lanier , Henry Fuchs , Andries van Dam , Kostas Daniilidis , Jane Mulligan , Loring Holden and Bob Zeleznik

Advanced Network and Services, Armonk (Advanced)Brown University, Providence (Brown)University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (UPenn)

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co-authors:

NTII: a research consortium

Sponsors:

Advanced Network and Services

National Science Foundation

Partner Schools:

Brown University, Providence

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

… a journey to the near future

…a glimpse of one possible destination, as seen by an artist in 1997

Medical applications:

- tele-diagnostics- tele-assisted surgery- advanced surgical training

- preoperative planning

Other:- tele-meetings- tele-collaborative design- computer supported training and education- 3D interactive video- entertainment

…May 2000, before submission of this presentation :

…soon after, in October 2000 :

Hardware and software technologies needed:

- 3D real-time system for acquisition of dynamic, real objects (Upenn)

- static scene acquisition (UNC)- rendering and stereo display architecture

(UNC)- high precision headtracking system (UNC) - modeling and manipulation with virtual

objects (Brown)- multi-person interaction and collaborative

architecture (Brown)

3 site tele-immersion

3 site tele-immersion

Upenn (OC3) Advanced (OC3)

UNC (OC12)

OC12 = 622 Mbit/sOC3 = 155 Mbit/s

Camera arrangement• a sea of cameras: semicircle of 7 cameras, 3

cameras per each view, 5 views in total

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PC2PC3

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C4 data C3 data

C5 data C4 data

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15 - 25 Mbit/s1-3 frames/s

Equipment:- acquisition: 5 Dell Pentium III servers (quads, 550 MHz)- 7 digital Sony cameras and 5 firewire interface cards- rendering: 2 Dell Pentium III (610, 550 Mhz) + nVidia

cards- HighBall ceiling headtracker

System characteristics:

- acquisition frame rate: 1-3 frames/sec- display / rendering rate: 20-25 frames/sec- data rate: 15-25 Mbit/sec

Future

Future

Now

One part of NTII team

Acknowledgements:

Sponsors:

Advanced Network and Services

National Science Foundation

Partner Schools:

Brown University, Providence

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Q & A