Copyright © 2008 Mohammed Ghanbari et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Immersive telecommunication technologies are typically used for capturing, processing, analyzing, transmitting, and enabling the remote fruition of objects,
environments, and bioentities. Applications of immersive telecommunication technologies may
span over a very wide range from industrial automation, health care, education
to entertainment.
Over the past
two decades, the joint work of networking and the multimedia has led to a wide
range of tools and supports, enabling the commercial world-wide deployment of
multimedia-based services and products. All the related research and
standardization activities enabled multimedia data to be adapted to different networking
technologies, wired and wireless, established and emerging, with different and
time-varying channel conditions. Also, the restrictions due to the terminal
processing power of handheld devices are on the way to be successfully overcome.
On the
other hand, computer graphics, computer vision, and virtual/augmented reality
communities have often developed conceptual models and tools working
separately, mainly for fulfilling local and specific needs of predefined contexts.
For instance, computer vision has often aimed at performing specific tasks
(e.g., tracking, object recognition) in some specific scenarios (e.g.,
providing localization and visualization for robotic application or video
surveillance). Computer graphics has developed a set of tools, such as
rendering and texturing, which have been mainly applied to animation and games
and, more in general, in the entertainment industry, mainly aiming to a local
use, though forms of remote collaborative environment (such as 3D gaming) are starting
to take off the ground. Similar approaches have been followed so far by
virtual/augmented reality research community.
In this
special issue, we present several papers to bridge the traditional gap existing
between immersive technologies and networking, focusing on how traditional and
emerging fields (e.g., pervasive computing) can be brought together under the
networking umbrella.
The first paper “Enabling
cognitive load-aware AR with rateless coding on wearable network,” by Razavi
et al., proposes a block-based form of rateless channel coding for wearable network,
which minimizes energy consumption by reducing the overhead from FEC. Compared
with the packet-based rateless coding, data loss is reduced and energy
consumption is improved with
this form of block-based coding.
The second paper
“Providing QoS for networked peers in distributed haptic virtual environments” deals with haptic information, where the quality of service (QoS) required
to support haptic traffic is significantly different from that used to support
conventional real-time traffic such as voice or 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 force interactions between two users
whereby force data is sent to the remote peer in addition to positional
information. The work presented involves both simulation and practical
experimentation where multimodal data is transmitted over a QoS-enabled IP
network.
In the third paper “A reliable and efficient remote instrumentation
collaboration environment,” Calyam et al. address an important problem
in remote access of scientific instruments over best effort networks. They
provide an analytical model that characterizes the user's quality of experience
(QoE) given the limitations imposed by the network. The model is tested via
objective and subjective measurements using a remote microscopy testbed. The
authors package the model into a Remote Instrumentation Colaboration
Environment (RICE) software with detailed explanation of potential
functionalities that include VoIP and health monitoring.
The
fourth paper “Sensor network-based localization for
continuous tracking applications: implementation and performance evaluation,” by
Denegri et al., presents
a localization platform that exploits a single-hop wireless sensor network (WSN),
based on a Microchip MCU and a Cypress RF device, for tracking of its moving
nodes. The authors divided the nodes into three sets: the anchor nodes that
generate ultrasonic pulses, the moving nodes which estimate the pulse trip-time,
and finally the nodes that collect data from the surrounding field. The computed
positions of the moving nodes and transferred information are sent to external
users on the Internet.
In the fifth paper “Remote laboratory
experiments in a virtual immersive learning environment,” Berruti et al.
introduce the Virtual Immersive Learning (VIL) test bench that focuses on
remote lecturing as an application. The importance of this work is the ability
of the proposed system to function as the base for various innovations and
algorithms that can be easily implemented and tested on the proposed and
developed framework. Besides its flexibility, the system is portable and has a
low price tag. The authors in this paper address the major features of the
framework supported with performance measurements.
Mohammed Ghanbari
Feng Wu
Cha Zhang
Ghassan Alregib
Athanasios Vasilakos