Connecting the dots: Networked mixed reality applications and transmission quality

Networked mixed reality applications typically consist of several kinds of media objects, e.g. live video streams of real objects combined with 3D animations, download, chat and haptic interaction control. Even though it seems obvious that these applications are likely to profit from concepts as Quality of Service (QoS) or path diversity, there often seems to be a kind of gap between the world of the network people and the multimedia software engineer. The goal of our research project DISCOVER (Distributed, Cooperative VR-Applications) is to bridge this gap by supplying an interface which provides simplified access to QoS and path diversity support, both in the application's developing process and at run time.