• September 17, 2003: The Remote Media Immersion system was demonstrated at a library dedication at Inha University, South Korea. The library is dedicated by Y.H. Cho, the Chairman of Korean Airlines in memory of his father. This milestone marks the first international demonstration of RMI. A complete Yima system (including server, client, and communications components) is installed to power the resident RMI demo, which includes an immersive audio system. This latest version of Yima has also been configured for live streaming capabilities to allow for two-way, interactive sessions in the future (see our Distributed Immersive Performance project for more details).

       

• April 22, 2003: The IMSC Remote Media Immersion (RMI) project has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the CENIC 2003 "On the Road to a Gigabit" Awards in the "Gigabit or Bust" category. IMSC faculty participants in the project include: Chris Kyriakakis, Roger Zimmermann, Christos Papadopoulos, Cyrus Shahabi, Ulrich Neumann, Tom Holman and Alexander Sawchuk.

• March 28 & 29, 2003: The RMI/Yima system was demonstrated as part of the Internet2 Performance Production Workshop and the Internet2 Music Education Symposium at the New World Symphony's Lincoln Theater in Miami Beach.

       

• Oct. 2002: Our Yima streaming system was featured at the Fall Internet2 Member Meeting. Additional information of the performance event and some pictures can be found here.

       

The Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California explores research issues in many diverse fields. The Remote Media Immersion (RMI) project is a testbed that integrates many of the technologies that are the result of these research efforts.

The goal of the RMI is to reproduce the complete aural and visual ambience of an environment that includes people and other real and virtual elements.

Remote Media Immersion (RMI) is a novel project with innovations in several major technical areas:

• Immersive Audio. Immersive audio is a technique developed at IMSC for capturing the audio environment at a remote site, transmitting the information to a client location, and accurately reproducing (rendering) the complete audio sensation at the client location with full fidelity, dynamic range and directionality. The procedure involves the measurement and calibration of the acoustic characteristics at the remote site and client location, recording 16 or more channels of audio information, processing of this information, and rendering it with 12 or more loudspeaker systems. Immersive audio accurately preserves the original audio frequency content and its correct directional relationships, thus reproducing the audio ambience of the remote site for a group of listeners.

• Real-Time Digital Storage and Playback of Multiple Independent Streams. The many different streams of video and audio data are stored and played back from the Yima system developed at IMSC. The goal of the Yima project is to design and develop an end-to-end architecture for real-time storage and playback of several high quality digital media streams through heterogeneous, scalable and distributed servers utilizing shared IP networks (e.g., Internet). The system consists of 1) a scalable, high performance, and real-time media server, 2) a real-time network streaming paradigm and 3) several video and audio clients.

  

  Fig. 2: An example of a 4-way Yima server cluster with attached storage.

  On the server side, the Yima architecture combines multiple commodity PCs into a server cluster to scale as demand grows. We currently use 933 MHz Pentium III computers running Linux, each with a 3Com 3C996B-T Gigabit Ethernet interface and a Seagate 73 GB Ultra160 SCSI LVD Cheetah disk for data storage. The client systems communicate with the server through the industry standard RTP and RTSP protocols that have been extended with our own buffer management feedback control mechanism and synchronization facilities. The Yima clients can render many different digital media flavors, e.g., from low bitrate MPEG-4 to very high bitrate MPEG-2 with multi-channel audio. Specifically, the RMI client is a Linux based PC that uses the RME 9652 "Hammerfall" multi-channel sound card to provide up to 16 (or 24) channels of uncompressed PCM audio for immersive sound. High definition MPEG-2 video decoding is achieved via a Vela Research CineCast HD board interfacing through our own Linux drivers. Additionally, the client software synchronizes the audio and video streams to provide frame accurate rendering.

  

  Fig. 3: RMI client with HD and panoramic video MPEG-2 decoders as well as 16 channel PCM audio output and Gigabit Ethernet.

  Yima distinguishes itself from other similar efforts due to its: 1) independence from media types, 2) frame/sample accurate inter-stream synchronization, 3) compliance with industry standards (e.g., RTSP, RTP, MP4), 4) a selective retransmission protocol, 5) a scalable design, and 6) multi-threshold buffering to support variable-bitrate media (e.g., MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX).

• Protocols for Synchronized, Efficient Real-Time Transmission of Multiple Immersidata Streams. The RMI system is capable of transmitting data from multiple distributed servers over local area and wide-area shared networks to many destinations simultaneously. One of the biggest challenges is to minimize the transmission delay, avoid any loss of data that could lead to hiccups or stuttering in the displayed audio and video, and ensuring synchronization of all the streams when finally rendered at the client site. These issues are referred to as quality of service (QoS), and are very important factors in the design of the RMI system. Our continuing work involves the optimization of procedures to ensure QoS for general immersive technology applications over many different types of networks.

• Acquiring and Displaying HDTV Video. The RMI video is transmitted at rate of up to 45 Megabits per second (Mb/s), faster than the 20 Mb/s rate for broadcast HDTV. In general, increasing the data transmission rate improves the picture quality and realism. It also reduces the overall delay in transmitting the information through a network by simplifying the video compression and other signal processing required. Reducing delay is particularly important for two-way (interactive) applications of RMI. RMI technology has the potential to increase the data transmission rate to more than 1000 Mb/s (1 Gigabit per second), offering the potential for even better video (larger screens, panoramic or hemispherical displays, and increased resolution).

We have performed experiments across both LAN and WAN environments. Our most recent tests were conducted via a trans-continental SUPERNET link from the Information Science Institute (ISI East) at Arlington, VA, to the USC campus in Los Angeles, CA. See also the SUPERNET Next Generation Internet (NGI) Experiments web site.

• Fall 2003: An article on the RMI system appeared in CENIC's InterAct magazine.
  
  • Article PDF (200 KB).

• August 26, 2003: The German ARD television ("Das Erste") was airing a story on RMI today on the show "Morgenmagazin" on the The Future of Television. (05.30 - 09.00 am: Morgenmagazin, Das ARD-Frühstücksfernsehen; Moma live: Visionen - Zukunft des Fernsehens / Bericht aus Los Angeles über die Zukunft des digitalen Fernsehens.)

• On Thursday May 9, 2002, IMSC's Remote Media Immersion (RMI) project was described in The New York Times. The article entitled "On Internet of the Future, Surfers May Almost Feel the Spray" by Eric A. Taub appeared in the Circuits section. The Yima project was is the streaming technology that enables high fidelity Internet on-demand media transmissions such as demonstrated by RMI.
  
  • Article PDF (1,329 KB).
• On Thursday May 9, 2002, Yima and RMI were covered during the 10 o'clock news on NBC-4.
  
  • Press clip in QuickTime format.
• On Thursday May 9, 2002, Yima and RMI covered during the 10 o'clock news on KTLA-5.
  
  • Press clip in QuickTime format (broadband speed).
  • Press clip in QuickTime format (modem speed).
• On Wednesday June 19, 2002, Yima and RMI were covered in USC's Daily Trojan. The article entitled "USC engineers develop new 3-D technology" by Sara Rodriguez appeared in the Summer Trojan.
  • Article PDF (40 KB).

• Roger Zimmermann and Cyrus Shahabi (Information Laboratory)
  

  Yima Streaming Media Server: The Yima server is based on a scalable cluster design. Each cluster node is a off-the-shelf personal computer with attached storage devices and, for example, a Fast Ethernet connection. The Yima server software manages the storage and network resources to provide real-time service to the various clients that are requesting media streams.

  Research Assistants:
  • Kun Fu, Ph.D., (server design and multi-threshold rate control)
  • Sahitya Gupta, M.S., (server distributed file system and streaming content preparation)
  • Mehrdad Jahangiri, M.S., (clients, infrared remote control, and multi-threshold flow control)
  • Nitin Nahata, M.S., (client hardware interfaces and streaming content preparation)
  • Vasan R. Sundar, M.S., (selective retransmission protocol)
  • Didi Shu-Yuen Yao, Ph.D., (server design and scalability)
  • Farnoush Banaei-Kashani, Ph.D., (RTSP design and implementation)
  • Beomjoo Seo, Ph.D., (multichannel audio interface)
  
  
• Chris Kyriakakis (Immersive Audio Laboratory) and Tomlinson Holman (School of Cinema-Television and TMH Corporation)
  

  Recording, processing and rendering of multi-channel immersive audio. The goal is to accurately reproduce aural sensations with full fidelity, dymanic range and directionality.

• Victor LaCour (IMSC Creative Producer)
  

  Content creation and HDTV animations.

• Christos Papadopoulos (Computer Networks and Distributed Systems Laboratory)
  

  Efficient real-time transmission of multiple immersidata streams over LANs and WANs. Selective retransmission scheme.

• Ulrich Neumann (Computer Graphics and Immersive Technologies Laboratory)
  

  Recording, processing and rendering of 360 degree panoramic video. Rendering of panoramic video in a head-mounted display. Authoring and editing environment.

• Alexander A. Sawchuk, Allan Weber, Seth Scafani (Signal and Image Processing Institute)
  

  Robust integration into a seamless presentation.

Get the PDF reader from Adobe.

• Yima: A Second Generation Continuous Media Server.
  Cyrus Shahabi, Roger Zimmermann, Kun Fu, and Shu-Yuen Didi Yao.
  Published in the IEEE Computer magazine, June 2002, pp. 56-64.
  Abstract Postscript (3,783 KB) PDF (913 KB)

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• Yima: Design and Evaluation of a Streaming Media System for Residential Broadband Services.
  Roger Zimmermann, Kun Fu, Cyrus Shahabi, Didi Yao, and Hong Zhu.
  Proceedings of the VLDB 2001 Workshop on Databases in Telecommunications (DBTel 2001), Rome, Italy, September 10, 2001.
  Abstract Postscript (65 KB) PDF (99 KB)

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• Integrated Media Systems.
  D. McLeod, U. Neumann, C.L. Nikias and A.A. Sawchuk.
  IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 33-76, January 1999. Abstract PDF (1,749 KB)
  

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Last updated: Monday September 22, 2003.
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