Multimedia Network for Inhabited Television

Goal

The objectives of the project are to explore Inhabited Television as a challenging application for multimedia networks. In particular:

to develop dynamic and scaleable mechanisms for session control and end to end Quality of Service management for Inhabited TV in the context of the IETF's emerging Integrated Services Architecture;
to develop abstractions and metaphors for making these visible and malleable to participants and application developers at the application interface; and
to construct a demonstrator to be run over BT's Futures Testbed experimental network in order to conduct network experiments.

36 months starting 1st October, 1997

Funding:

Funded by EPSRC and BT (this project is an extension of the BT project Network Architectures for Inhabited Television)

Partners:

The following are links to related pages:

eRENA: Electronic arenas for culture, performance, art and entertainment.
Network Architectures for Inhabited Television: New network protocols for very large scale public collaborative virtual environments focusing on multicast protocols, consistency and heterogeneity. The BT funded project which this one is a continuation of.
The Internet Foyer: The Internet Foyer relates to this project in that it involved early work into streaming video into Virtual Environments.
Virtual and Augmented Environments for CSCW

Inhabited TV: Very large-scale collaborative virtual environments delivered over multimedia networks into the home. Citizen applications for arts, performance, entertainment, education, games and retail.

Large-Scale Dynamic Network Architectures: Supporting very large numbers of participants, dynamic session control and QoS management, spatially scoped hierarchical multicasting, traffic modelling and analysis.
Spatial Audio and Video: Integration and management of video and audio communications into Collaborative Virtual Environments.
Mixed Realities: New forms of interface based on transparent boundaries between physical and virtual worlds - group interaction with shared displays.
Human Control over Networking: Mechanisms whereby participants, application developers and system managers can easily understand and manipulate complex network characteristics (e.g. using the spatial model to control QoS).