Verdione targets cooperative applications that merge virtual elements into the real world. The ultimate goal is for users, including musicians, actors, singers and spectators, to become immersed in a virtual reality that includes their local environment, and where users' arbitrary actions can be disseminated to their remote communication partners.

To understand and satisfy the needs of the World Opera, we explore the impact of delay and synchronity on interactive performances and audiovisual art. The artists will heavily depend on our communication services. A breakdown can severly influence the quality-of-experience for all users, and in particular the audience. Hence, we have to design resilient services that can cope with unavoidable network problems by adapting fast and properly to any situation. The main objectives of Verdione are:

User-centric Interface Design

Natural interactions between singers and actors in live performances with local audiences are vital for technology acceptance. We will therefore involve users and audience early in the design process. We will conduct regular quality assessments sessions to define limits on design parameters (e.g. resolution requirements) and to get early user feedback. This helps to avoid entering wrong directions, reduces effort invested into unnecessary complex designs and allows early identification of poor design decisions.

Capturing and Rendering of 3D Video

Verdione will design software and hardware systems to capture, process, transfer and render video data from several stages in real-time.  We will design prototypes of immersive displays that can be embedded into a stage setup and we will work on 3D capuring and free-view video coding algorithms that are robust enough for production-grade use.

Latency and Synchronity Control

Verdione will develop mechanisms to support the latency and synchronity demands of actors and spectators in a distributed interactive application with many streams and several media in a context- and situation-specific manner. The developed mechanisms will overcome resource limitations in the network and on end-systems by exploiting application-specific knowledge about the relevance of individual data streams for actors and spectators. This does in particular include aspects of scalable coding.

Adaptation and Dependability

Verdione will develop adaptive, dependable and scalable middleware solutions for the resource management  in real-time interactive applications. The framework will a) combine techniques for unifying adaptation and dependability, b) adaptively integrate different communication types and provide for their cross-synchronization, and c) address the issues of overlay-level many-to-many dissemination of multimedia content. We will improve two currently non-scalable elements of planning mechanisms: a) exhaustive search of the entire solution space for the composition of possible configurations and b) centralized planning algorithms and planning data.

Resilient Networking

Verdione will develop resilient networking solutions that support high quality and delay-critical applications. Deficiencies regarding resilient routing and many-to-many communication in current IP networks with heterogeneous access networks will be addressed. We will explore and advise improvements to resilient IP routing and develop an optimized two-way interaction between IP networks and a resilient overlay.