MPEG Media Transport (MMT) for 3D Tele-Immersion Systems

3D Tele-Immersion (3DTI) environments are a new medium for highly interactive and immersive means of collaborations through a shared virtual 3D environment. They have many applications in the areas of education, entertainment, sports training, tele-medicine etc. The data in these systems are multi-modal, some high volume, some high frequency and all highly correlated. We identify three major challenges in a general 3DTI system, session management, synchronization and data format conversion. We discuss the shortcomings of some of the existing protocols/solutions to them. We describe some features relevant to 3DTI of the MPEG Media Transport (MMT) standard. In this paper we evaluate the use of MMT in a 3DTI application. We provide a feature comparison with the most popular protocols currently being used in such applications, RTP, RTSP, TCP and UDP etc. MPEG DASH was another protocol that was being considered, but that also fails to fully address some of the challenges that 3DTI applications face. Through this comparison study we advocate the use of MMT in 3DTI applications.