Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

A SEMINAR REPORT ON
Looking towards the busy future in an innovative way

By,
Ghosh Gaurab S (Enrollment No. : 090370116031)

Guided By,
Ms. Mauni Shah

Department of Information Technology Parul Institute of Engineering and Technology Waghodia-391760, Vadodara, Gujarat (India)

October 2011
Page | 1

Enrollment No: 090370116031 Parul Institute of Engineering and Technology P.O. Limda,Tal. Waghodia-391760 Dist. Vadodara, Gujarat (India) Phone: +91-2668-262327, 263355/56 Website: www.parul.ac.in

Tele-Immersion

Date:

This is Certify that the student Shri Reg. No. Ghosh Gaurab S. of . Class BE-IT (5th Sem)

090370116031

Has satisfactorily completed the course in Seminar .

Within four walls of Parul Institute of Engineering & Technology Limda.

Guide
Ms. Mauni Shah [Lecturer] Information Technology Department PIET, Waghodia, Vadodara.

H.O.D.
Mr. G. B. Jethva [Head] Information Technology Department PIET, Waghodia, Vadodara.

Page | 2

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Firstly I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Almighty for His solemn presence throughout the seminar study.

I would also like to express my special thanks to the Our College for providing me an opportunity to undertake this seminar.

I am deeply indebted to our seminar coordinator Ms. Mauni Shah, Lecturer in the Department of Information And Technilogy for providing me with valuable advice and guidance during the course of the study.

I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Faculty of the Department of Information And Technology for their constructive support and cooperation at each and every juncture of the seminar study.

I offer my special gratitude to my Family Members, Friends, And Colleagues for their help, support, encouragement and inspiration to accomplish this study.

Finally I would like to express my gratitude to Parul Institute of Engineering And Technology for providing me with all the required facilities without which the seminar study would not have been possible.

Ghosh Gaurab S. (090370116031)

Page | 3

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

ABSTRACT
Tele-immersion is a technology to be implemented together in a simulated environment to interact. Users will feel like they are actually looking, talking, and meeting with each other face-to-face in the same room. This is achieved using computers that recognize the presence and movements of individuals and objects tracking those individuals and images and reconstructing them onto one stereoimmersive surface. 3D reconstruction for tele-immersion is performed using stereo, which means two or more cameras take rapid sequential shots of the same object, continuously performing distance calculations, and projecting them into the computer-simulated environment, as to replicate real-time movement. Tele immersion is a technology that will be implemented with Intemet2. It will enable users in different geographical locations to come together and interact in a simulated holographic environment. Users will feel as if they are actually looking, talking and meeting with each other face to face in the same place, even though they may be miles apart physically. In a tele-immersive environment, computers recognize the presence and movements of individuals as well as physical and virtual objects. They can then track these people and non-living objects, and project them in a realistic way across many geographic locations. It has varied applications and it will significantly affect the educational, scientific and medical sectors. Its main application is in video conferencing and it takes video conferencing to the next level. It is a dynamic concept, which will transform the way human interact with each other and the world in general.

Page | 4

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

CONTENTS
Introduction .... 6 The History .... 7 What is Tele-Immersion? .... 8 Requirements of Tele-Immersion .... 9 o 3D environment scanning .... 9 o Reconstruction in a holographic environment .... 12 o Projective and display technologies .... 13 o Tracking technologies .... 13 o Moving sculptures .... 14 o Audio technologies .... 14 o Powerful networking .... 14 o Computational needs .... 16 o Tele cubicle .... 16 o Tele-Immersion studio .... 18 Applications .... 19 Challenges of Tele-Immersion .... 23 Solution .... 24 o About Internet2 .... 24 o Desktop Supercomputers .... 25 o Bandwidth issues .... 26 Current developments .... 27 Conclusion .... 29 Future scope .... 30 Bibliography .... 31 Page | 5

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

INTRODUCTION
Tele-immersion, 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 through 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, tele-immersion stations convey them as "moving sculptures'', without favoring a single point of view. The result is that all the participants, however distant, can share and explore a life-size space.

Beyond improving on videoconferencing, tele-immersion 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 tele-immersion, it can probably support any other application. This is because tele-immersion 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.

Tele-immersion can be of immense use in medical industry and it also finds its application in the field of education.

Page | 6

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

THE HISTORY
It was in 1965 that, Ivan Sutherland proposed the concept of the 'Ultimate Display'. It described a graphics display that would allow the user to experience a completely computer-rendered environment. 'The term Tele-immersion was first used in October 1996 as the title of a workshop organized by EVL and sponsored by Advanced Network & Services, Inc. to bring together researchers in distributed computing, collaboration, VR, and networking. At this workshop, specific attention was paid to the future needs of applications in the sciences, engineering, and education. In 1998 Abilene, a backbone research project was launched and now serves as the base for Internet-2 research. Tele-immersion is the application that will drive forward the research of Internet-2.

Page | 7

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

WHAT IS TELE-IMMERSION ?
Tele-immersion enables users at geographically distributed sites to collaborate in real time in a shared, simulated, hybrid environment as if they were in the same physical room.

It is the ultimate synthesis of media technologies: 3D environment scanning. Projective and display technologies. Tracking technologies. Audio technologies. Powerful networking.

The considerable requirements for tele-immersion system, such as high bandwidth, low latency and low latency variation make it one of the most challenging net applications. This application is therefore considered to be an ideal driver for the research agendas of the Internet2 community.

Tele-immersion is that sense of shared presence with distant individuals and their environments that feels substantially as if they were in one's own local space. This kind of tele-immersion differs significantly from conventional video teleconferencing in that the use's view of the remote environment changes dynamically as he moves his head.

Page | 8

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

REQUIREMENTS OF TELE-IMMERSION
Tele-immersion is the ultimate synthesis of media technologies. It needs the best out of every media technology. The requirements are given below:

3D ENVIRONMENT SCANNING
For a better exploring of the environment a stereoscopic view is required. For this, a mechanism for 3D environment scanning method is to be used. It is by using multiple cameras for producing two separate images for each of eyes. By using polarized glasses we can separate each of the views and get a 3D view.

The key is that in tele-immersion, each participant must have a personal view point of remote scenes-in fact, two of them, because each eye must see from its own perspective to preserve a sense of depth. Furthermore, participants should be free to move about, so each person's perspective will be in constant motion. Tele-immersion demands that each scene be sensed in a manner that is not biased toward any particular viewpoint (a camera, in contrast, is locked into portraying a scene from its own position). Each place, and the people and things in it, has to be sensed from all directions at once and conveyed as if it were an animated three-dimensional sculpture. Each remote site receives information describing the whole moving sculpture and renders viewpoints as needed locally. The scanning process has to be accomplished fast enough to take place in real time at most within a small fraction of a second.

The sculpture representing a person can then be updated quickly enough to achieve the illusion of continuous motion. This illusion starts to appear at about 12.5 frames per second (fps) but becomes robust at about 25 fps and better still at faster rates.

Page | 9

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

Measuring the moving three-dimensional contours of the inhabitants of a room and its other contents can be accomplished in a variety of ways. In 1993, Henry Fuchs of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had proposed one method, known as the "sea of cameras" approach, in which the viewpoints of many cameras are compared. In typical scenes in a human environment, there will tend to be visual features, such as a fold in a sweater, that are visible to more than one camera. By comparing the angle at which these features are seen by different cameras, algorithms can piece together a three-dimensional model of the scene.

This technique had been explored in non-real-time configurations, which later culminated in the "Virtualized Reality "demonstration at Carnegie Mellon University, reported in 1995. That setup consisted of 51 inward looking cameras mounted on a geodesic dome. Because it was not a real-time device, it could not be used for teleimmersion. Ruzena Bajcsy, head of GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, was intrigued by the idea of real-time seas of cameras. Starting in 1994, small scale, "puddles" of two or three cameras to gather real-world data for virtualreality applications was introduced.

But a sea of cameras in itself isn't complete solution. Suppose a sea of cameras is looking at a clean white wall. Because there are no surface futures, the cameras have no information with which to build a sculptural model. A person can look at a white wall without being confused. Humans don't worry that a wall might actually be a passage to an infinitely deep white chasm, because we don't rely on geometric cues alone - we also have a model of a room in our minds that can rein in errant mental interpretations. Unfortunately, to today's digital cameras, a person's forehead or Tshirt can present the same challenge as a white wall, and today's software isn't smart enough to undo the confusion that results.

Page | 10

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

Researchers at Chapel Hill came with a novel method that has shown promise for overcoming this obstacle, called imperceptible structured light or ISL. Conventional light bulbs flicker 50 or 60 times a second, fast enough for the flickering to be generally invisible to the human eye. Similarly, ISL appears to the human eye as a continuous source of white light, like an ordinary light bulb, but in fact it is filled with quickly changing patterns visible only to specialized, carefully synchronized cameras. These patterns fill in voids such as white wall with imposed features that allow a sea of cameras to complete the measurements. If imperceptible structured light is not used, then there may be holes in reconstruction data that result from occlutions, areas that aren't seen by enough cameras, or areas that don't provide distinguishing surface features.

To accomplish the simultaneous capture and display an office of the future is envisioned where ceiling lights are controlled cameras and "smart" projectors that are used to capture dynamic image-based models with imperceptible structured light techniques, and to display high-resolution images on designated display surfaces. By doing simultaneously on the designated display surfaces, one can dynamically adjust or auto calibrate for geometric, intensity, and resolution variations resulting from irregular or changing display surfaces, or overlapped projector images.

Now the current approach to dynamic image-based modeling is to use an optimized structured light scheme that can capture per-pixel depth and reflectance at interactive rates. The approach to rendering on the designated (potentially irregular) display surface is to employ a two-pass projective texture scheme to generate images that when projected onto the surfaces appear correct to a moving head-tracked observer.

Page | 11

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

RECONSTRUCTION IN A HOLOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT

The process of reconstruction of image occurs in a holographic environment. At the transmitting end, the 3d image scanned is generated using two techniques. The reconstruction process is different for shared table and ic3d approach. Shared Table Approach Here, the depth of the 3d image is calculated using 3d wire frames; this technique uses various camera views and complex image analysis algorithms to calculate the depth.

Assuming that the geometrical parameters of the multi-view capture device, the virtual scene and the virtual camera are well fitted to each other. It is ensured that the scene is viewed in the right perspective view, even while changing the viewing position. Ic3d(incomplete 3d) Approach In this case, a common texture surface is extracted from the available camera views and the depth information is coded in an associated disparity map. This representation can be encoded into a mpeg-3 video object which is then transmitted.

The decoded disparities are scaled according to the user's 3d viewpoint in the virtual scene, and a disparity-controlled projection is carried out. The 3d perspective of the person changes with the convenient of the virtual camera.

In both the approaches, at the receiving end the entirely composed 3d scene is rendered onto the 2d display of the terminal by using a virtual camera, the position of the virtual camera coincides with the current position of the conferee's head, for this purpose the head position is permanently registered by a head tracker and the virtual camera is moved with the head.

Page | 12

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

PROJECTIVE & DISPLAY TECHNOLOGIES

By using tele-immersion a user must feel that he is immersed in the other person's world. For this, a projected view of the other user's world is needed. For producing a projected view, big screen is needed. For better projection, the screen must be curved and special projection cameras are to be used.

TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES
It is great necessity that each of the objects in the immersive environment be tracked so that we get a real world experience. This is done by tracking the movement of the user and adjusting the camera accordingly. Head & Hand tracking The UNC and Utah sites collaborated on several joint design-and-manufacture efforts, including the design and rapid production of a head-tracker component (HiBall) (now used in the experimental UNC wide-area ceiling tracker). Precise, unencumbered tracking of a user's head and hands over a room sized working area has been an elusive goal in modern technology and the weak link in most virtual reality systems. Currant commercial offerings based on magnetic technologies perform poorly around such ubiquitous, magnetically noisy computer components as CRTs, while optical-based products have a very small working volume and illuminated, beacon targets (LEDs). Lack of an effective tracker has crippled a host of augmented reality applications in which the user's views of the local surroundings are augmented by synthetic data (e.g., location of a tumor in the patient's brain or the removal path of a part from within a complicated piece of machinery).

Page | 13

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

MOVING SCULPTURES
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, tele-immersion stations convey them as "moving sculptures", without favoring a single point of view. The result is that all the participants, however distant, can share and explore a life size space.

AUDIO TECHNOLOGIES
For true immersive effect the audio system has to be extended to another dimension, i.e., a 3D sound capturing and reproduction method has to be used. This is necessary to track each sound source's relative position.

POWERFUL NETWORKING
The considerable requirements for tele-immersion system, such as high bandwidth, low latency and low variation (jitter), make it one of the most challenging net applications. Internet 2 - the driving force behind Tele-immersion: It is the next generation internet. Tele-immersion was conceived as ideal application for driving network engineering research. Internet2 is a consortium consisting of the US government, industries and around 200 universities and colleges.

It has high bandwidth and speed. It enables revolutionary internet applications.

Page | 14

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

Need for speed: If a computer network can support tele-immersion, it can probably support any other application. This is because tele-immersion 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. Strain to Network: In tele-immersion not only participant's motion but also the entire surface of each participant had to sent. So it strained a network very strongly. Our demand for bandwidth varies with the scene and application; a more complex scene requires more bandwidth. Network backbone: A backbone is a network within a network that lets information travel over exceptionally powerful, widely shared connections to go long distances more quickly. Each of earlier net played a part in inspiring new applications for the Internet, such as the World Wide Web. Another backbone research project, called Abilene, began in 1998, and it was to serve a university consortium called Internet2.

Abilene now reaches more than 170 American research universities. If the only goal of Internet2 were to offer a high level of bandwidth (that is, a large number of bits per second), then the mere existence of Abilene and related resources be sufficient. But Internet2 research targeted additional goals, among them the development of new protocols for handling applications that demand very high bandwidth and very low, controlled latencies (delays imposed by processing signals and route).

Page | 15

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

COMPUTATIONAL NEEDS
Beyond the scene-capture system, the principal components of a teleimmersion setup are the computers, the network services, the display and interaction devices. Literally dozens of processors are currently needed at each site to keep up with the demands of tele-immersion. Roughly speaking, a cluster of eight twogigahertz Pentium processors with shared memory should be able to process a trio within a sea of cameras in approximately real time. Such processor clusters should be available in the later year.

Bandwidth is a crucial concern. Our demand for bandwidth varies with the scene and application; a more complex scene requires more bandwidth. We can assume that much of the scene, particularly the background walls and such, is unchanging and does not need to be resent with each frame.

Conveying a single person at a desk, without the surrounding room, at a slow frame rate of about two frames per second has proved to require around 20 megabits per second but with up to 80-megabit-per-second peaks. With time, however, that number will fall as better compression techniques become established. Each site must receive the streams from all the others, so in a three-way conversation the bandwidth requirement must be multiplied accordingly.

TELE-CUBICLE
The tele-cubicle represents the next generation immersive interface. It can also be seen as a subset of all possible immersive interfaces. An office appears as one quadrant in a larger shared virtual office space. The canvases onto which the imagery can be displayed are a stereo-immersive desk surface as well as at least two stereo. Such a system represents the unification of Virtual Reality and video-conferencing and it provides an opportunity for the full integration of VR into the workflow.
Page | 16

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

Physical and virtual environments appear united for both input and display. This combination, we believe, offers a new paradigm for human communications and collaboration. Tele cubicle which consists of two wall surfaces and a desk surface which projects 3D images. It consists of a stereo immersive desk surface and two stereo-immersive wall surfaces. These three display surfaces join to form a corner desk unit. The walls appear as windows to the other users' environment while the desks join together to form a virtual conference table in the centre. This will allow the realistic inclusion of tele-immersion into the work environment as it will take up the usual amount of desk space.

Today's tele-immersion combines the superior display of CAVE and ImmersaDesk display systems with advanced network capabilities .The CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) is a multi-display virtual reality device comprised of three projection screen, two "walls" and a "floor" which projects real-time images in response to the user's eye and/or head movements. To ensure the quality) of the picture and timeliness of response, the CAVE must be controlled by a powerful machine or super-computer. In some cases, CAVE processing units contain lip to sixteen processors. CAVE is an example of 3D display system which implements"Tele-cubicle".
Page | 17

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

TELE-IMMERSION STUDIO
It's a room with all arrays of video cameras to provide multiple viewpoints and a group of computers to process the digitized images. The people, who appeared as 3D images, were tracked with an array of eight ordinary video cameras while three other video cameras captured real light patterns in room to calculate distances. This enables the proper depth to be recreated on the 3D space.

In a remote location, a viewer sits in front of a screen wearing polarized glasses like those used for 3D movies. The screen shows what or who is in front of the array of video cameras. If the observer moved his or her head to the left, he/she could see the corresponding images that would be seen if she were actually in the room with the person on the screen.

Page | 18

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

APPLICATIONS
1. Collaborative Engineering Works
Teams of engineers might collaborate at great distances on computerized designs for new machines that can be tinkered with as through they were real models on a shared workbench. Archaeologists from around the world might experience being present during a crucial dig. Rarefied experts in building inspection or engine repair might be able to visit locations without losing time to air travel.

2. Video Conferencing
Although few would claim that tele-immersion will be absolutely as good as "being there" in the near term, it might be good enough for business meetings, professional consultations, training sessions, trade show exhibits and the like. Business travel might be replaced to a significant degree by tele-immersion in 10 years. This is not only because tele-immersion will become better and cheaper but because air travel will face limits to growth because of safety, land use and environmental concerns.

3. Immersive Electronic Book

Applications of tele-immersion will include immersive electronic books that in effect blend a "time machine" with 3D hypermedia, to add an additional important dimension, that of being able to record experiences in witch a viewer, immersed in the 3D reconstruction, can literally walk through the scene or move backward and forward in time. While there are many potential application areas for such novel technologies (e.g., design and virtual prototyping, maintenance and repair, paleontological and archaeological reconstruction), the focus here will be on a socially important and technologically challenging driving application, teaching surgical management of difficult, potentially lethal, injuries.
Page | 19

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

4. Collaborative mechanical CAD

A group of designers will be able to collaborate from remote sites in an interactive design process. They will be able to manipulate a virtual model starting from the conceptual design, review and discuss the design at each stage, perform desired evaluation and simulation, and even finish off the cycle with the production of the concrete part on the milling machines.

5. Entertainment
Tele-immersive holographic environments have a number of applications. Imagine a video game free of joysticks, in which you become a participant in the game, fighting monsters, or scoring touchdowns.

6. Medicine
Tele immersion can be of immense use to the field of medicine. The way medicine is taught and practiced has always been very hands-on. It is impossible to treat a patient over the phone or give instructions for a tumour to be removed without physically being there. With the help of tele-immersion, 3D surgical learning for virtual operations is now in place and, in the future, the hope is to be able to carry out real surgery on real patients. A geographically distanced surgeon could be teleimmersed into an operation theatre to perform an operation. This could potentially be lifesaving if the patient is in need of' special care (either a technique or a piece of equipment), which is not available at that particular location. Tele-immersion 'will give surgeons, the ability to superimpose anatomic images right on their patients while they are being operated on'.

Page | 20

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

7. Live chat
Instead oftraveling hundreds of miles to visit your relatives during the holidays, you can simply call thein up and join them in a shared holographic room.

8. Uses in education
In education, tele-immersion can be used to bring together students at remote sites in a single environment. Relationships among educational institutions could improve tremendously in the future with the use of tele-immersion. Already, the academic world is sharing information on research and development to better the end results. Doctors and soldiers could use tele-immersion to train in a simulated environment. This will be a distinct advantage in surgical training. While it will not replace the hands-on training, this technology will give surgeons a chance to learn complex situations before they treat their patients. With tele-immersion in schools, students could have access to data or control a telescope from a remote location, or meet with students from other countries by projecting themselves into a foreign space. Internet2 will provide access to digital libraries and virtual labs, opening up the lilies of communication for students. Tele-immersion will bring to their places, equipment and situations earlier not available, helping them experience what they could have only watched, read, or heard about earlier.

9. Future office In years to come, instead of asking for a colleague on the phone you will find it easier to instruct your computer to find him or her. Once you do that, you'll probably see a flicker on one of your office walls arid line that your colleague, who's physically present in another city, is sitting right across you as if he or she is right there. The person at the other end will experience the same immersive connection. With tele-immersion bringing two or more distant people together in a single, simulated office setting, business travel will become quite redundant.
Page | 21

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

10. Other applications

Building inspectors could tour structures without leaving their desks. Automobile designers from different continents could meet to develop the next generation of vehicles. In the entertainment industry, ballroom dancers could train together from separate physical spaces. Instead of commuting to work for a board meeting, businesspersons could attend it by projecting themselves into the conference room. The list of applications is large and varied, and one thing is crystal clear this technology will significantly affect the educational, scientific, and medical sectors.

Page | 22

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

CHALLENGES OF TELE-IMMERSION
Tele-immersion has emerged as a high-end driver for the Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth, and reservation efforts envisioned by the NGI and Internet2 leadership. From a networking perspective, tele-immersion is a very challenging technology for several reasons. The networks must be in place and tuned to support high-bandwidth applications. Low latency, needed for 2-way collaboration, is hard to specify and guarantee given current middleware. The speed of light in fiber itself is a limiting factor over transcontinental and transoceanic distances. Multicast, unicast, reliable and unreliable data transmissions (called "flows") need to be provided for and managed by the networks and the operating systems of supercomputer-class workstations. Real-time considerations for video and audio reconstruction ("streaming") are critical to achieving the feel of tele-presence, whether synchronous or recorded and played back. The computers, too, are bandwidth limited with regard to handling very large data for collaboration. Simulation and data mining are open-ended in computational and bandwidth needs-there will never be quite enough computing and bits/second to fully analyze, and simulate reality for scientific purposes.

In Layman's language the realization of tele-immersion is impossible today due to: 1. The non-availability of high speed networks 2. The non-availability of supercomputer
3. Large network bandwidth requirement reasons

Page | 23

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

SOLUTION
The first two basic problems can be overcome when Internet-2 will come into picture later and third problem can be overcome by the fast development of image compression techniques.

ABOUT INTERNET-2
Internet2 is not a separate physical network and will not replace the current Internet. It is not for profit consortium consisting of 200 US universities. Industries and is directly under the control of US govt.. Internet2 is for developing and deploying advanced network applications and technology, accelerating the creation of tomorrows Internet. Internet2 enables completely new applications such as digital libraries, virtual laboratories, distance-independent learning and tele-immersion. A key goal of this effort is to accelerate the diffusion of advanced Internet technology, in particular into the commercial sector. Internet2 is the second generation internet, helps to develop advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, by recreating the partnerships among academia, industry, and government.

Another backbone research project, called Abilene, begun in 1998, and it was to serve Internet2. Abilene now reaches more than 170 American research universities. Internet2 research targeted in the development of new protocols for handling applications that demand very high bandwidth and very low, controlled latencies (delay is reduced by processing signals along their travel through the network).

Page | 24

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

We need a powerful network with high speed and high bandwidth to transfer the large amounts of data that tele-immersion will produce. Internet2 will replace the current Internet infrastructure. This new network will hale a higher bandwidth and speeds that are 1000 times faster than today's Internet. This high-bandwidth, highspeed provided by Internet2 is sufficient to transfer the large amounts of data that tele-immersion will produce.

Internet 2 had a peculiar problem no existing application that requires the high level of performance provided by internet 2 except tele-immersion.

Desktop supercomputers
The Grid will use distributed computing. There are not enough supercomputers to deal with the enormous amounts of data that will rush through the Net in the future. As a solution, new networks will connect their PCs so they can share processing power and hard disk space. They will be locked in to a grideffectively creating one supercomputer. About a dozen American universities are doing research various aspects of immersive technologies, including USC, the University of North Carolina, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University Mainly two institutions called PENN and UNC (University of North Carolina) are doing researches in tele-immersion.

Page | 25

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

Bandwidth issues
Network bandwidth required to make tele-immersion work is one of the main concerns of this new technology. It is estimated that as much as 1.2 gigabits per second will be needed for future high-quality effects. This is much higher than the average home connection bandwidth. The exact amount of bandwidth needed for each scene depends on the complexity of the background. With time, the number of megabits used for transmitting a scene will reduce as advanced compression techniques are established. Initially, bandwidth-intensive applications will have to be limited to the larger organizations that can afford high connection speeds.

Page | 26

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS
Haptic sensors: Miniaturized force/torque sensors
There is an increasing need for measuring forces acting between human hands and the environment. External finger forces are measured by placing force sensing pads at the fingertips. A wide variety of such pads have been developed in the past for applications in robotics and medicine, using resistive, capacitive, piezoelectric, or optical elements to detect force. A critical problem with these force sensors is that they are often bulky and inevitably deteriorate the human's haptic sense, since the fingers cannot directly touch the environment surface.

Recently, much research has focused on reducing this problem by inventing thinner and more flexible force-sensing pads, a new approach to the detection of finger forces is presented in order to completely eliminate any impediment to the natural haptic sense and hence the name haptic sensors. (Haptic means that 'relating to or based on the sense of touch'). An optical sensor mounted on the fingernail detects the force. This allows the human to touch the environment with bare fingers and perform fine, delicate tasks using the full range of haptic sense. Miniaturized optical components and circuitry allow the sensor to be disguised as a decorative fingernail covering.

Page | 27

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

Haptic sensor is a new type of touch sensor for detecting contact pressure at human fingertips. Hence the sensor is mounted on the fingernail rather than on the fingertip. Specifically, the fingernail is instrumented with miniature light emitting diodes (LEDs) and photo detectors in order to measure changes in the reflection intensity when the fingertip is pressed against a surface. The changes in intensity are then used to determine changes in the blood volume under the fingernail, a technique termed reflectance photoplethysmography". A homodynamic model is used to investigate the dynamics of the blood volume at two locations under the fingernail. A miniaturized prototype nail sensor is de-signed, built, and tested. The theoretical analysis is verified through experiment and simulation.

Haptic sensors would allow people to touch projections as if they were real. A 3D sensor and supporting software has been developed and patented that enables the realtime visualization of the haptic sense of pressure. Haptic sensors can be used in teleimmersion systems to sense the pressure and reconstruct the feeling of touch in combination with other devices.

Page | 28

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

CONCLUSION
Tele-immersion is a fast developing technology and it is going to benefit the common man once Internet-2 comes into picture, it is of immense use in the field of: Medicine It helps in reducing business travel Education and numerous other fields

Tele-immersion is a dynamic concept, which will transform the way humans, interact with each other and the world in general.

Tele-immersion is a technology that is certainly going to bring a new revolution in the world and let us all hope that this technology reaches the world in its full flow as quickly as possible.

Page | 29

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

FUTURE SCOPE
The tele-immersion system of 2012 would ideally: Support one or more flat panels/projectors with ultra-high color resolution (say 5000x5000) Be stereo capable without special glasses Have several built-in micro-cameras and microphones Have tether-less, low-latency, high-accuracy tracking Network to teraflop computing via multi-gigabit optical switches with low latency Have exquisite directional sound capability Be available in a range of compatible hardware and software configurations Have gaze-directed or gesture-directed variable resolution and quality of rendering Incorporate AI-based predictive models to compensate for latency and anticipate user transitions Use a range of sophisticated haptic devices to couple to human movement and touch Accommodate disabled and fatigued users in the spirit of the Every Citizen Interface to the NTII (National Tele-Immersion Initiative).

Page | 30

Enrollment No: 090370116031

Tele-Immersion

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. www.tele-immersion.citrus-us.org 2. www.fp.mcs.anl.gov 3. www.ieee.com 4. www.wikwpedia.org 5. www.NTII.com 6. www.advancedorg.tele-immersion.com 7. www.newscientist.com 8. www.internet2.edu 9. www.cis.upenn.edu 10. www.mrl.nyu.edu 11. www.howstuffworks.com

Page | 31