MASAA: a case study in building a distributed integrated media database

The possibility of immersing a user into a virtual environment is quickly becoming a reality. At the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) we are exploring the unique challenges presented by such systems in the context of our own implementation, the Media Immersion Environment (MIE). A challenging aspect of immersive environments is the persistent storage of vast amounts of heterogeneous data. The authors present their efforts and experience in building a storage infrastructure for the MIE. The different characteristics, requirements, and heterogeneity of the encountered data present new challenges for their acquisition, storage, access, and analysis. In the context of a sample application, collaborative immersipresence, hosted on the MIE, we investigated these challenges in a realistic setting to build the current version of the MIE storage infrastructure. We report on our progress so far and describe remaining challenges, extensions, and future research directions.