Networked Appliances: Manipulation of 3D Multimedia Streams

There is undoubtedly an increase in the number of consumer appliances that are enjoying networking capabilities. With data throughput increasing among devices that are renowned to be less capable than personal computers, we see an increase in the consumption of multimedia. In parallel, gaming and social networking are at the forefront of next generation entertainment systems where new and novel usage scenarios are pushing technological boundaries. Mobile devices are becoming more like computers and vice versa and television is becoming more interactive. These advances have undoubtedly provided a platform for innovation, where a natural progression would be to blur the gap between the aforementioned technologies. For example, multimedia service provided by a television could be integrated within a virtual environment and manipulated in ways not yet seen. Here we could see television rendered as 2D linear images and as 3D models of the scene itself. This will provide the user with immersive digital content that can be changed, viewed from multiple angles, and even handled. We present a new approach demonstrated using a working prototype to implement a virtual environment capable of receiving multimedia content from a networked appliances, and manipulating it in new and novel ways.