Implementing a Distributed Tele-immersive System

We present our implementation and evaluation of TEEVE, a distributed 3D tele-immersive system. TEEVE is among the first to support multi-stream/multi-site 3D tele-immersive environments with commercial off-the-shelf hardware and software infrastructures. It promotes collaborative physical activities among geographically dispersed sites by immersing the 3D representations of remote participants into a joint 3D virtual space. In this paper, we describe our implementation of TEEVE and introduce the recent advances in its different system components. In particular, we present an implemented protocol for semantic-aware data dissemination to support multi-site remote collaboration. We evaluate the TEEVE system by deploying it on the Internet. The experimental results demonstrate that it achieves stable visual quality, soft real-time delay, and efficient resource usage.