Multimedia Immersive Technologies and Networkingdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/am/2008/983735.pdf · automation, health care, education to entertainment. Over the past two decades,

Hindawi Publishing CorporationAdvances in MultimediaVolume 2008, Article ID 983735, 2 pagesdoi:10.1155/2008/983735

EditorialMultimedia Immersive Technologies and Networking

Mohammed Ghanbari,1 Feng Wu,2 Cha Zhang,3 Ghassan Alregib,4 and Athanasios Vasilakos5

1 School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK2 Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing 100080, China3 Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, USA4 School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 210 Technology Circle, GA 31407, USA5 University of Western Macedonia, P.O. Box 65251, 15410 Attica, Greece

Correspondence should be addressed to Cha Zhang, [email protected]

Received 16 December 2008; Accepted 16 December 2008

Copyright © 2008 Mohammed Ghanbari et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

Immersive telecommunication technologies are typicallyused for capturing, processing, analyzing, transmitting, andenabling the remote fruition of objects, environments, andbioentities. Applications of immersive telecommunicationtechnologies may span over a very wide range from industrialautomation, health care, education to entertainment.

Over the past two decades, the joint work of networkingand the multimedia has led to a wide range of tools andsupports, enabling the commercial world-wide deploymentof multimedia-based services and products. All the relatedresearch and standardization activities enabled multimediadata to be adapted to different networking technologies,wired and wireless, established and emerging, with differentand time-varying channel conditions. Also, the restrictionsdue to the terminal processing power of handheld devices areon the way to be successfully overcome.

On the other hand, computer graphics, computer vision,and virtual/augmented reality communities have oftendeveloped conceptual models and tools working separately,mainly for fulfilling local and specific needs of predefinedcontexts. For instance, computer vision has often aimed atperforming specific tasks (e.g., tracking, object recognition)in some specific scenarios (e.g., providing localization andvisualization for robotic application or video surveillance).Computer graphics has developed a set of tools, such asrendering and texturing, which have been mainly applied toanimation and games and, more in general, in the entertain-ment industry, mainly aiming to a local use, though formsof remote collaborative environment (such as 3D gaming)are starting to take off the ground. Similar approaches havebeen followed so far by virtual/augmented reality researchcommunity.

In this special issue, we present several papers to bridgethe traditional gap existing between immersive technologiesand networking, focusing on how traditional and emergingfields (e.g., pervasive computing) can be brought togetherunder the networking umbrella.

The first paper “Enabling cognitive load-aware AR withrateless coding on wearable network,” by Razavi et al.,proposes a block-based form of rateless channel coding forwearable network, which minimizes energy consumptionby reducing the overhead from FEC. Compared with thepacket-based rateless coding, data loss is reduced and energyconsumption is improved with this form of block-basedcoding.

The second paper “Providing QoS for networked peersin distributed haptic virtual environments” deals with hapticinformation, where the quality of service (QoS) requiredto support haptic traffic is significantly different from thatused to support conventional real-time traffic such as voiceor video. In this paper, Marshall et al. present a peer-to-peer distributed haptic virtual environment (DHVE)architecture of positions. The paper aims to enable forceinteractions between two users whereby force data is sentto the remote peer in addition to positional information.The work presented involves both simulation and practicalexperimentation where multimodal data is transmitted overa QoS-enabled IP network.

In the third paper “A reliable and efficient remoteinstrumentation collaboration environment,” Calyam et al.address an important problem in remote access of scientificinstruments over best effort networks. They provide ananalytical model that characterizes the user’s quality ofexperience (QoE) given the limitations imposed by the

2 Advances in Multimedia

network. The model is tested via objective and subjectivemeasurements using a remote microscopy testbed. Theauthors package the model into a Remote InstrumentationColaboration Environment (RICE) software with detailedexplanation of potential functionalities that include VoIPand health monitoring.

The fourth paper “Sensor network-based localizationfor continuous tracking applications: implementation andperformance evaluation,” by Denegri et al., presents alocalization platform that exploits a single-hop wirelesssensor network (WSN), based on a Microchip MCU and aCypress RF device, for tracking of its moving nodes. Theauthors divided the nodes into three sets: the anchor nodesthat generate ultrasonic pulses, the moving nodes whichestimate the pulse trip-time, and finally the nodes that collectdata from the surrounding field. The computed positions ofthe moving nodes and transferred information are sent toexternal users on the Internet.

In the fifth paper “Remote laboratory experiments ina virtual immersive learning environment,” Berruti et al.introduce the Virtual Immersive Learning (VIL) test benchthat focuses on remote lecturing as an application. Theimportance of this work is the ability of the proposedsystem to function as the base for various innovations andalgorithms that can be easily implemented and tested on theproposed and developed framework. Besides its flexibility,the system is portable and has a low price tag. The authorsin this paper address the major features of the frameworksupported with performance measurements.

Mohammed GhanbariFeng Wu

Cha ZhangGhassan Alregib

Athanasios Vasilakos

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Multimedia Immersive Technologies and Networkingdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/am/2008/983735.pdf · automation, health care, education to entertainment. Over the past two decades,