Towards Multi-Site Collaboration in 3D Tele-Immersive Environments

3D tele-immersion (3DTI) has recently emerged as a new way of video-mediated collaboration across the Internet. Unlike conventional 2D video-conferencing systems, it can immerse remote users into a shared 3D virtual space so that they can interact or collaborate "virtually". However, most existing 3DTI systems can support only two sites of collaboration, due to the huge demand of networking resources and the lack of a simple yet efficient data dissemination model. In this paper, we propose to use a general publish-subscribe model for multi-site 3DTI systems, which efficiently utilizes limited network resources by leveraging user interest. We focus on the overlay construction problem in the publish-subscribe model by exploring a spectrum of heuristic algorithms for data dissemination. With extensive simulation, we identify the advantages of a simple randomized algorithm. We present optimization to further improve the randomized algorithm by exploiting semantic correlation. Experimental results demonstrate that we can achieve an improvement by a factor of five.