Technical Description
The DHX project aims to develop and establish a networked VE- infrastructure and VE-content for installation in museums, cybertheatres, and other public institutions, which allow the mutual exchange of digital cultural and natural heritage information. European and Asian partners are participating in the creation of transcontinental immersive experiences on a global scale, using high-bandwidth Trans-Euro-Asian networks.
The contribution of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication to this project: to provide a distributed IT infrastructure and to develop both authoring tools to produce and process digital storytelling content and computer vision methods to easily capture natural environments. These systems, which will run with the AVANGO software framework (or, in case of KIST, with NAVER), will include advanced paradigms to interact with three- and two-dimensional content and to facilitate the connection to external data repositories via a database connection.
The project consists of a number of major working areas: The development of advanced
tools to create the contents for the research prototypes is presently under way. These contents include not only cultural heritage sites, but also ecological data. The representation of vast landscapes requires the use of multi-camera systems to photograph 3D-data that will be processed into panoramic views. Photometric scene descriptions will be offered additionally. The ecological data include animal models, which can interact with the virtual environment.
The installation of the necessary infrastructure systems requires the development of multiple technical innovations, foremost the development of global networks to bridge the huge distance between Europe and Asia. Communication across long distances is made possible through audio and video streaming or via automated or remotely controlled synthetic avatars.
Currently, a range of low-cost VR-systems tailored to the specific requirements of museums and other public institutions are under development.
In discussion are also applications such as distributed interaction including group interaction, as well as standardization issues regarding the authoring tools for automated storytelling contents.
Hardware / Software
Software: AVANGO™, see:
http://www.imk.fraunhofer.de/sixcms/detail.php?template=&id=2192&_SubHP=Divisions&_Folge=&abteilungsid=2022&_temp=PR