Distributed Area of Interest Management for Large-Scale Immersive Video Conferencing

Abstract

Although video conferencing and its related applications have grown into a significant research area, the limited scalability of conference size is still a major problem. In this paper, a range of strategies for real-time area of interest (AOI) management in a 3D immersive video conference (IVC) are evaluated with the objective of minimising the required video transmission capacity and hence maximising the number of concurrent users. The paper shows that with judicious application of these techniques, the download capacity requirements of clients can be reduced by as much as 90% in a crowded virtual space.