IMMERSIVE MULTIMEDIAImmersive telecommunication technologies are typically used for capturing, processing, analyzing, transmitting, and enabling the remote fruition of objects, environments, and bioentities. Applications of immersive telecommunication technologies may span over a very wide range from industrial automation, health care, education to entertainment.

Over the past two decades, the joint work of networking and the multimedia has led to a wide range of tools and supports, enabling the commercial world-wide deployment of multimedia-based services and products. All the related research and standardization activities enabled multimedia data to be adapted to different networking technologies, wired and wireless, established and emerging, with different and time-varying channel conditions. Also, the restrictions due to the terminal processing power of handheld devices are on the way to be successfully overcome.

On the other hand, computer graphics, computer vision, and virtual/augmented reality communities have often developed conceptual models and tools working separately, mainly for fulfilling local and specific needs of predefined contexts. For instance, computer vision has often aimed at performing specific tasks (e.g., tracking, object recognition) in some specific scenarios (e.g., providing localization and visualization for robotic application or video surveillance). Computer graphics has developed a set of tools, such as rendering and texturing, which have been mainly applied to animation and games and, more in general, in the entertainment industry, mainly aiming to a local use, though forms of remote collaborative environment (such as 3D gaming) are starting to take off the ground. Similar approaches have been followed so far by virtual/augmented reality research community

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology which allows interacting with a 3D computer-simulated environment as if it was real, whether that environment is a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world.A computer simulation, or a computational model, is a computer program, which attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of many natural systems from physics, biology, to human systems in economics, psychology, and social science, as well as in the process of engineering new systems in order to gain insight into their behaviour.Presence is a theoretical concept describing the effect that people experience when they interact with a computer-mediated or computer-generated environment (Sheridan, 1994). Lombard and Ditton (1997) described presence as "an illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated".

In particular the Virtual Reality group conducts research in the following areas:

Serious Games, or Game-based Learning Agent Based Modelling ( e.g. pedestrian, intelligent traffic systems, social systems,

computational biology) Presence in Virtual Environments Believable Characters and Social Synthetic Interactions, Synthetic Models of Personality

and Emotion Interactive Creative Media

The above picture shows a young businessman navigating

in virtual reality interface such as advertising his company’s products to customers.

REFERENCES:

http://www.123rf.com/photo_9056595_young-businessman-navigating-in-virtual-reality-interface-future-collection-one-of-a-series.html