Immersive projection-based display environments have been growing steadily in popularity. However, these systems have, for the most part, been confined to laboratories or other special-purpose uses and have had relatively little impact on human-computer interaction or user-to-user communication/collaboration models. Before large-scale deployment and adoption of these technologies can occur, some key technical issues must be resolved. We address these issues in the design of the Metaverse. In particular, the Metaverse system supports automatic self-calibration of an arbitrary number of projectors, thereby simplifying system's setup and maintenance. The Metaverse also supports novel communication models that enhance the scalability of the system and facilitate collaboration between Metaverse portals. Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of the Metaverse.
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H. INFORMATION SYSTEMS H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION H.5.3 GROUP AND ORGANIZATION INTERFACESUniversity of Kentucky / The Metaverse tween immersive environments, but relies on exceptionally high-bandwidth dedicated and/or quality-of-serviceguaranteed underlying network to transmit video and model information from one immersive environment to another. 7 Also, communication is typically allowed only between "identical" environments since the video being transmitted would not provide the correct "perception" in a dissimilar environment. Thus, these systems are collaborative only to a limited extent, and the scale of the collaboration is typically limited to one other environment (i.e., communication is over a point-to-point channel). They are also too expensive, large, or complex to be used by the typical computer user working in an office, classroom, lab, or at home.Several key technical issues remain to be solved before these new models of collaboration and interaction will begin to see large-scale deployment and use. First the cost of purchasing, installing, and maintaining immersive systems must be reduced to the point where they become affordable (e.g. as a replacement for the user's office computing environment). This implies the system must be built from inexpensive commodity parts rather than specialized high-end equipment. Second, the issues of installation, maintenance, and ease of use must be addressed. One of the main issues is calibration of the system. Carefully placing and aligning the various components of a projection systems is both difficult and time consuming. Ideally the system will self-configure and then monitor itself so that it can reconfigure itself automatically in response to changes in the environment or configuration. Third, if immersive systems are to be used in an interactive fashion, supporting collaboration among distant users, new models of communication must be developed, both within an immersive environment and between immersive environments, as well as efficient protocols and infrastructure for storing, accessing, and modifying the (model of the) Metaverse.
