At the Fall 2002 Internet2 Consortium Member Meeting hosted by USC, IMSC demonstrated the Center's Remote Media Immersion (RMI) technologies to present a performance by the New World Symphony.

This is the view the audience was experiencing at the event on a 30 by 17 foot screen in USC's Bing Theater. An immersive sound system provided multi-channel sound while the video was projected in high-definition 720p format (at 40 Mb/s).

The sound-transparent screen was installed so that it was vertically retractable. The large sub-woofer is on the right-hand side.

Three projectors were used for a total of seven different performance events. The New World Sympony video was projected from the left-most projector, which was equipped with a serial digital input (SDI).

The client equipment to drive the projector and speakers. Left rack: equalizers for all the speakers. Right rack: A Protools 24MixPlus system with a G4 Macintosh, 2 888|24 I/O boxes, a 24 bit ADAT bridge, and a USD synchronizer. Right on the floor: a Linux PC running the Yima HD video and multi-channel audio client software. The red cable on the floor is the fiber Gigabit Ethernet connection to the USC campus network and Internet2, over which the media streams are received. For immersive sound 16 (or 24) channels of uncompressed 24-bit PCM audio are forwarded from the PC's RME 9652 "Hammerfall" multi-channel sound card via ADAT to Protools. The device next to the PC (1U rack-mountable, standing on its side) is a Vela Research CineCast HD board interfaced through our own Linux drivers. It is connected to the PC via a SCSI channel, decodes high definition MPEG-2 video and produces the SDI output (either 720p or 1080i) for the projector. Additionally, the client software synchronizes the audio and video streams to provide frame accurate rendering.

System setup by Ph.D. students Beomjoo Seo and Shihua Liu. The audio stream consisted of 16 channels of 24-bit audio (encapsulated in 32-bit words) at 48,000 samples per second for a total bandwidth of 24 Mb/s. The video stream was MPEG-2 compressed in 720p format (1280x720 pixels at 59.94 frames per second) at a data rate of 40 to 45 Mb/s. Audio and video were transmitted via separate RTP/RTSP sessions.

Beomjoo Seo, one of the Ph.D. students working on the Yima software is testing the streaming system. We have performed experiments across both LAN and WAN environments. The Internet2 event was conducted via a transcontinental Internet2 Abilene link from the Information Science Institute (ISI East) at Arlington, VA, to the USC campus in Los Angeles, CA.

The video output is tested and calibrated on the screen.

The rehearsal the night before the actual event.

Internet2's Ann Doyle introduces Chris Kyriakakis who describes the RMI system to the audience before the performance event.

The Internet2 Yima team after the event. From left to right: Shihua Liu, Kun Fu, Wei-Shinn Ku, Roger Zimmermann, and Beomjoo Seo. Missing from the picture are Cyrus Shahabi, Mehrdad Jahangiri, and Didi Shu-Yuen Yao.

A lively discussion between Cyrus Shahabi, Alexander Sawchuk, Andy Patrizio (Wired.com editor), and Roger Zimmermann.

Maintained by Roger Zimmermann
Last updated: Friday January 3, 2003.
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