Newsletter
IMSC eNews, April 2004
Contact: Nichole Phillips, (213) 740-3237 nicholep@imsc.usc.edu
IMSC STUDENT CONFERENCE FOCUSES ON MULTIMEDIA TRENDS-IMSC's Eighth Annual Student Conference in March focused on multimedia trends with presentations by industry representatives. Dr. Newton Lee, senior staff engineer at Disney Online and IMSC Board of Councillors member, spoke about the Disney Company's Internet offerings and described how the company is striving to become a "major provider of rich media over the broadband Internet." Qiong Liu, a research scientist at IMSC partner FX Palo Alto Laboratory, presented on the lab's work on "shared interactive video for teleconferencing." Prof. Tomlinson Holman, a key IMSC investigator who also heads TMH Labs, told the conference about latest developments with IMSC's 10.2-channel Immersive Audio technology, describing the installation of the system a week earlier at the Institut International du Multimedia, part of the young and dynamic Pôle Universitaire Leonardo de Vinci in Paris. Prof. Holman said this twentieth installation is the first in Europe. The conference also featured a luncheon panel on future trends in multimedia and presentations by IMSC students on their research projects.
USC SYMPOSIUM ON COMMUNICATION SHOWCASES IMSC PROJECTS-Thirteen IMSC projects related to communication were showcased at the Fourth Annual Walter H. Annenberg Symposium on campus in April. Some 40 USC projects and centers were spotlighted in exhibit booths at the symposium, which was sponsored by the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and the Annenberg School for Communication. The IMSC projects were:
--Panoramic Video-related projects involving psychological therapy (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anger management, social phobias and pain management) and journalism. (Presented by Prof. Skip Rizzo, Prof. Larry Pryor and a student.)
--Chojo, a mobile game for students to interact with a virtual 3D USC campus. Collaborators: USC School of Cinema-Television's Interactive Media Division, Scott Fisher, Chair; and IMSC, Victor LaCour and Suya You.
--Media Scholar, a digital application to explore how different media, including video, film, music, speech, 3D objects in sculpture or architecture, photography and painting, can be used effectively in scholarly discourse. Collaborators: Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, Chris Gilman and Eric Gordon; and IMSC, Victor LaCour.
--Sim-Finance, a multimedia game that demonstrates how a sequence of financially critical decisions and life events affect a user's economic situation over time. Collaborators: USC Marshall School of Business, Prof. J. Kimball Dietrich; USC Credit Union, Gary J. Perez, President; and IMSC, Victor LaCour.
--Augmented Reality for Enhancing Medical Training and Education. Collaborators: USC School of Dentistry, James Mah; and IMSC, Suya You and Reyes Enciso.
--An Intelligent Grammar Checker for Compositions in the Style of Palestrina, a tool that can assist composers in the creation of better Palestrina-style music compositions. Collaborators: USC Thornton School of Music and IMSC, Cheng Zhi Anna Huang.
--An Integrated Analysis and Modeling of Speech and Gestural Characteristics in Conversational Child-Computer Interactions. Collaborators: USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, Elaine Andersen; and IMSC, Shri Narayanan.
Visit http://www.annenberg.edu/symposia/annenberg/2004/expo for descriptions of the projects.
3D DISPLAY SYSTEM PAPER RECEIVES AWARD-Zahir Alpaslan, an IMSC graduate student in electrical engineering, and Prof. Alexander A. Sawchuk, IMSC Deputy Director and professor of electrical engineering, received a Best Presentation award from the International Society of Optical Engineering (SPIE) for their paper, "Three Dimensional Interaction with Autostereoscopic Displays." The paper was given in January at the SPIE Stereoscopic Displays and Applications Conference of the Symposium on Electronic Imaging, held in San Jose, CA. The paper describes techniques for manipulating and interacting with real or virtual 3D objects, using a light source cursor. The objects are viewed on an autostereoscopic system, a display that requires no glasses, goggles or other external devices to produce the 3D sensation. For more information, visit http://imsc.usc.edu/research/project/stereovideo/index.html.
IMSC DEMONSTRATES TV NEWS OF THE FUTURE PROJECT-IMSC key investigator Prof. Skip Rizzo and his team demonstrated the Center's virtual reality TV news project to journalists at the annual conference of the Associated Press Television and Radio Association of California and Nevada in April at Disneyland's Paradise Pier Hotel in Anaheim, CA. Reporters tried out IMSC's headset and "pano-chamber" in experiencing the Center's vision of a TV new report of the future as recorded by a panoramic, 360-degree camera. They watched Naomi Worrell, an IMSC student at the time, give a mock news report on the homeless as she stood amid L.A.'s Skid Row, with the homeless milling around their tents and makeshift shelters. They also watched the scene unfold all around them as they sat on a chair inside the pano-chamber, a circular structure with Plexiglas walls. IMSC researchers use the five-camera panoramic video system and viewing devices in experiments with various immersive news reporting scenarios that could be possible in the future as the delivery of news changes because of the Internet and other technologies. Presently, researchers are conducting user tests to see if the panoramic presentation improves viewer recall of events as compared to the common news report. They are also evaluating if viewers prefer the panoramic display and if they feel more involved in the news story. IMSC is collaborating with the USC Annenberg School of Journalism on the project.
The Integrated Media Systems Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center at the University of Southern California.