STCP: Receiver-agnostic Communication Enabled by Space-Time Cloud Pointers

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Computer Engineering)During the last decade, mobile communication technologies have rapidly evolved and ubiquitous network connectivity is nearly achieved. However, we observe that there are critical situations where none of the existing mobile communication technologies is usable. Such situations are often found when messages need to be delivered to arbitrary persons or devices that are located in a specific space at a specific time. For instance at a disaster scene, current communication methods are incapable of delivering messages of a rescuer to the group of people at a specific area even when their cellular connections are alive because the rescuer cannot specify the receivers of the messages. We name this as receiver-unknown problem and propose a viable solution called SpaceMessaging. SpaceMessaging adopts the idea of Post-it by which we casually deliver our messages to a person who happens to visit a location at a random moment. To enable SpaceMessaging, we realize the concept of posting messages to a space by implementing cloud-pointers at a cloud server to which messages can be posted and from which messages can fetched by arbitrary mobile devices that are located at that space. Our Android-based prototype of SpaceMessaging, which particularly maps a cloud-pointer to a WiFi signal fingerprint captured from mobile devices, demonstrates that it first allows mobile devices to deliver messages to a specific space and to listen to the messages of a specific space in a highly accurate manner (with more than 90% of Recall)

Towards a Modular Architecture for eXtended Reality Systems

For full-fledged social acceptance of eXtended Reality (XR) systems, emphasis should be on design prototypes to allow frictionless, context-aware, and secure interaction with non-specialized users. This necessitates a modular architecture to ensure that the system is versatile and applicable across applications, and is open to the integration of interaction modalities. We discuss our proposal for (and prototypical implementation of) a modular architecture for XR systems that relies on cloud infrastructure resources and edge computing frameworks with shared communication protocols for scalability. The modules are abstracted from both functional and non-functional requirements, including security

Implementation of a holistic digital twin solution for design prototyping and virtual commissioning

Industry 4.0 has ushered in a new era of digital manufacturing and in this context, digital twins are considered as the next wave of simulation technologies. The development and commissioning of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) is taking advantage of these technologies to improve product quality while reducing costs and time to market. However, existing practices of virtual design prototyping and commissioning require the cooperation of domain specific engineering fields. This involves considerable effort as development is mostly carried out in different departments using vendor specific simulation tools. There is still no integrated simulation environment commercially available, in which all engineering disciplines can work collaboratively. This presents a major challenge when interlinking virtual models with their physical counterparts. This paper therefore addresses these challenges by implementing a holistic and vendor agnostic digital twin solution for design prototyping and commissioning practices. The solution was tested in an industrial use case, in which the digital twin effectively prototyped cost-efficient solar assembly lines

Performance Analysis of an IoT Platform with Virtual Reality and Social Media Integration

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing network of physical objects where the devices are connected to the Internet through unique addressing schemes and multiple protocols. The increase of IoT devices in the recent years presents significant challenges in terms of security, authentication and usability. The recently introduced Social Internet of Things (SIoT) tries to address these challenges with the virtualisation of IoT devices and the use of an infrastructure where people and IoT devices can communicate with each other, both in the real-world and virtual-world, through a common platform. In the proposed SIoT architecture, IoT devices can be operated by virtual reality (VR)headsets and Twitter, a social media platform. The aim of the platform is to allow users to seamlessly operate IoT devices, using their preferred interface: remotely with text messages (i.e. tweets) and VR headsets or operate the IoT devices directly. This paper also describes the implementation of a testbed and presents the performance analysis of the solution, demonstrating its feasibility and low latency

OpenBIM-Tango integrated virtual showroom for offsite manufactured production of self-build housing

As a result of progressive use of BIM in the AEC sector, the amount of diverse project information is increasing rapidly, thus necessitating interoperability of tools, compatibility of data, effective collaboration and sophisticated data management. Media-rich VR and AR environments have been proven to help users better understand design solutions, however, they have not been quite advanced in supporting interoperability and collaboration. Relying on capabilities of openBIM and IFC schema, this study posits that this shortcoming of VR and AR environment could be addressed by use of BIM server concept allowing for concurrent multiuser and low-latency communication between applications. Successful implementation of this concept can ultimately mitigate the need for advanced technical skills for participation in design processes and facilitate the generation of more useful design solutions by early involvement of stakeholders and end-users in decision making. This paper exemplifies a method for integration of BIM data into immersive VR and AR environments, in order to streamline the design process and provide a pared-down agnostic openBIM system with low latency and synchronised concurrent user accessibility that gives the “right information to the right people at the right time”. These concepts have been further demonstrated through development of a prototype for openBIM-Tango integrated virtual showroom for offsite manufactured production of self-build housing. The prototype directly includes BIM models and data from IFC format and interactively presents them to users on both VR immersive and AR environments, including Google Tango enabled devices. This paper contributes by offering innovative and practical solutions for integration of openBIM and VR/AR interfaces, which can address interoperability issues of the AEC industry

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms