The Metaverse Project

Overview

We have been developing networked collaborative, visually immersive environments that are inexpensive, automatically configurable, widely-deployable, and scalable. We call the environment the Metaverse (which was first used in Neil Stephenson's science fiction novel Snowcrash to refer to a similar immersive environment). The objective of our Metaverse is to provide users with an environment that fools the users' visual senses into believing that the traditional barriers of time and space have been removed. Virtual reality, tele-immersion, distance learning, tele-presence, digital libraries, and video on demand systems all contain particular elements needed to implement an immersive Metaverse environment - an environment that affords users access to a new Universe of interactions not available via conventional communication.

We are designing cost-effective, scalable, automatically configurable/calibrated Metaverse Portals that are immersive, interactive, and vertically integrated with the network to inherently and efficiently support collaboration among Portals.

Unlike alternative immersive designs, our portal design can be used in both high-end environments such as carefully designed CAVEs and in low-end environments such as a user's office (and anything in between). Each portal consists of an arbitrary number of metaverse elements, constructed from off-the-shelf components at low cost. Each metaverse element includes a rendering client (PC), a network card, a graphics accelerator, and a high-resolution projector as well as associated display and networking software. Metaverse elements communicate over the network, are self-calibrating, and automatically configure themselves into a coherent immersive interface, regardless of the number of elements use or their location. Consequently, new metaverse elements can be added or removed quickly and easily to increase or decrease the "size" of the portal and the system will automatically reconfigure itself. Because the metaverse elements are vertically integrated with the network, metaverse elements automatically determine the portal to which they belong and know how to communicate with elements in other portals via group communication services. We have also explored programmable network services to allow greater control of the network and packet delivery by end systems.

Select Publications

A proactive tree recovery mechanism for resilient overlay multicast Z. Fei, and M. Yang, IEEE/ACM Transactions On Networking, vol 15, pp 173, 2007
Building layered active services, C. Dhillon, M. Bond, J. Griffioen, and K. Calvert, Computer Networks, vol 50, pp 2475, 2006
A segmentation-based fine-grained peer sharing technique for delivering large media files in content distribution networks, Z. Fei, and M. Yang, IEEE Transactions On Multimedia, Vol 8, pp 821, 2006
A Multi-path Routing Service for Immersive Environments S. Shi, L. Wang, K. Calvert, and J. Griffioen, In Proceedings of the Workshop on Grids and Advanced Networks 2004 (GAN 04) at the 4th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2004.
Passive Inference of Path Correlation L. Wang, J. Griffioen, K. Calvert, and S. Shi, In Proceedings of the NOSSDAV '04 Conference, 2004.
The Metaverse - A Collection of Inexpensive, Self-configuring, Immersive Environments, C. Jaynes, B. Seales, K. Calvert, and Z. Fei J. Griffioen, In the Proceedings of The 7th International Workshop on Immersive Projection Technology, 2003.
Parametric Subpixel Matchpoint Recovery with Uncertainty Estimation: A Statistical Approach Matt Steele and Christopher Jaynes, IEEE Workshop on Statistical Analysis in Computer Vision in conj. with CVPR, 2003.
Towards Visualizing HCI for Immersive Environments: The Meta-Situational Tracker C. Jaynes, J. Mazur, and C. Lio, ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, Sketches and Applications Session, 2002.
Lightweight Network Support for Scalable End-to-End Services, K. Calvert, J. Griffioen, and S. Wen, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM 2002), August, 2002.
CALM: Congestion-Aware Layered Multicast S. Wen, J. Griffioen, and K. Calvert, In Proceedings of the IEEE Open Architectures and Network Programming Workshop 2002 (OPENARCH 02), 2002.

People

The metaverse project includes faculty from several different departments:

Kenneth L. Calvert (Computer Science)
Zongming Fei (Computer Science)
James Griffioen (Computer Science)
Chris Jaynes (Computer Science)
James Mcdonough (Mechanical Engineering)
Doreen Maloney (New Media)
Joan Mazur (College of Education)
W. Brent Seales (Computer Science)

Sponsor

The National Science Foundation

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. EIA-0101242.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.