Real-time immersive multimedia experience for collaborating users over hybrid broadcast networks

The delivery of 3D immersive media to individual users remains a highly challenging problem due to the large amount of data involved, diverse network characteristics and user terminal requirements, as well as users´ context such as their preferences and location. As the number of visual views increases, current systems struggle to meet the demanding requirements in terms of delivery of consistent video quality to fixed and mobile users. The ROMEO (Remote Collaborate Multimedia Experience over the Future Internet) project funded under the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission focuses on the delivery of live and collaborative 3D immersive media. This facilitates application scenarios such as immersive social TV and high quality immersive and real-time collaboration. In order to support these application scenarios, the project focuses on developing new methods for compressing and delivering 3D multi-view video and spatial audio, as well as optimising the networking and compression jointly across the Future Internet. The proposed solution combines the Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial2 (DVB-T2) broadcast technology together with a Quality of Experience (QoE) aware Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distribution system that operates over wired and wireless links. An audio-visual communication overlay is also utilised for bringing the remote collaborators together to jointly enjoy the streamed 3D immersive media, which in turn requires the live streaming 3D content to be received by the collaborating users all at the same time with only an un-noticeable latency. This paper introduces the overall system architecture of the ROMEO project as well as some preliminary results.