Newsletter

IMSC eNews, January 2004

Contact: Nichole Phillips, (213) 740-3237 nicholep@imsc.usc.edu

IMSC TO REACH ANOTHER INTERNET APPLICATION MILESTONE-IMSC will reach another milestone in Internet application development this month with the demonstration of low-cost, live, two-way, high-definition (HD) video and two-channel audio streamed over the Internet between the Center's campus theater and the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Prof. Roger Zimmermann will conduct the demonstration of the system at the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network Consortium (APAN) meeting on January 29 at the University of Hawaii. He pointed out that the major advances of this IMSC system are its affordability and portability. He said that, with the IMSC advances, business teleconferencing can now potentially be much more affordable and flexible over the Internet. He explained that, in the past, businesses have had to pay the extra cost of dedicated lines among company sites for teleconferencing. But now they will be able to use the Internet for extremely high-quality, low-cost teleconferencing and other applications.

The demonstration will make use of the high-speed capabilities of the Internet, which are developed and used in research by universities and others and are available commercially to businesses in many areas. (The Internet's high-speed capabilities have been developed by several research initiatives, using such names as Internet 2 and the Next Generation Internet.) Prof. Zimmermann said that most traditional implementations of live media streaming suffer from a number of limitations. For example, he said, the picture resolution and quality are usually limited and do not convey a good sense of presence. He also said that, in the past, the few systems that have achieved HD media quality have required very costly equipment. In Hawaii, Prof. Zimmermann will use a portable setup that costs less than one-tenth of comparable systems. The portable system includes a JVC high-definition camera, with encoder built in; a standard personal computer; projector; microphones; and speakers. Prof. Zimmermann's group integrated an MPEG-over-FireWire acquisition module, a low latency transmission protocol, and a high-speed software decoder in the new system. This live streaming system is a component of the High Performance Data Recording Architecture (HYDRA) project. The goal HYDRA is to improve current applications and enable new ones by acting as an efficient media stream coordinator that manages the transmission, recording and playback of many different data streams simultaneously. Go to http://dmrl.usc.edu/hydra for more information on HYDRA.

IMSC VIRTUAL REALITY SYSTEM EASES PAIN FOR SICK CHILDREN-An IMSC virtual reality (VR) system developed to ease the pain and anxiety for children when they have their blood drawn is showing promising results in an ongoing study at Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles. Children at the hospital who used the VR system reported feeling significantly less pain than children who did not use the system, according to preliminary data. Dr. Jeffrey I. Gold, a psychologist on the Magik (Making Aches Go Away in Kids) Comfort and Pain Program, presented the preliminary findings at the Second Annual CyberTherapy Conference in San Diego in early January.

The randomized, controlled trial of distraction during routine blood draw at the Childrens Hospital Outpatient Laboratory is comparing three forms of distraction versus the standard procedure. The experimental distraction conditions during routine blood draw include a) while the child watches a cartoon, b) while the child navigates with a joystick through a virtual environment on a flat screen, or c) while the child experiences the virtual environment by wearing a headset and navigating around it with a joystick. The virtual environment was created by Prof. Rebecca Allen in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA as part of collaboration with IMSC on the project. Preliminary results show that children who used the headset reported significantly less pain than those in the other groups. "This study is one of numerous field tests in the United States and other countries of IMSC's virtual environments designed to address health issues," according to Prof. Skip Rizzo, a psychologist who heads the Center's virtual environment projects. Go to http://imsc.usc.edu/humanfactors for more information on IMSC's virtual environment projects.

PAPER ACCEPTED FOR PREMIER SOFTWARE ENGINEERING CONFERENCE-The paper, "A Hybrid Architectural Style for Distributed Parallel Processing of Generic Data Streams," by key IMSC investigator Dr. Alexandre Francois has been accepted for presentation at the 2004 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) to be held May 23-28 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The paper describes the software architecture of Dr. Francois' Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI) framework and illustrates it with cross-disciplinary projects developed at IMSC. ICSE is the premier software engineering conference. For information on SAI, go to http://imsc.usc.edu/research/project/sai.

The Integrated Media Systems Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center at the University of Southern California.