Recent Advances in Immersive Multimedia

This special issue focuses on the recent advances in immersive multimedia, and presents eight articles that tackle a wide spectrum of challenges related to the adoption of immersive multimedia in novel applications spreading across various domains. Immersive multimedia has become a reality due to the active development of extended reality , which is an umbrella term for emulating a physical world in a virtual world, leveraging various human senses. One driving force of such development is the appearance of consumer-grade head-mounted displays and the immediate market of computer games. Immersive multimedia, however, has other novel applications in many domains, such as occupational training, health care, manufacturing, education, tourism, and real estate, to name a few. Adopting immersive multimedia for novel applications in these domains is quite challenging from both technology and sociology perspectives, and, thus, requires interdisciplinary discussions. From the technology perspective, immersive multimedia dictates high bandwidth, short latency, and reliable transmission of media content, which can be better fulfilled with edge/cloud architectures and advanced networks. From the sociology perspective, the success of immersive multimedia depends on the human—computer interface, which is highly application dependent. This special issue offers a timely collection of research updates to benefit researchers and practitioners working in fields ranging across multimedia, networking, cloud computing, and human—computer interfaces, with the aim of motivating social researchers and business agencies to deploy novel immersive multimedia in these fields.