TEEVE: The next generation architecture for tele-immersive environments

Tele-immersive 3D multi-camera room environments are starting to emerge and with them new challenging research questions. One important question is how to organize the large amount of visual data, being captured, processed, transmitted and displayed, and their corresponding resources, over current COTS computing and networking infrastructures so that "everybody" would be able to install and use tele-immersive environments for conferencing and other activities. In this paper we propose a novel cross-layer control and streaming framework over general purpose delivery infrastructure, called TEEVE (Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody). TEEVE aims for effective and adaptive coordination, synchronization, and soft QoS-enabted delivery of tele-immersive visual streams to remote room(s). The TEEVE experiments between two teleimmersive rooms residing in different institutions more than 2000 miles apart show that we can sustain communication of up to 12 3D video streams with 4-5 3D frames per second for each stream, yielding 4-5 tele-immersive video rate.