Sensors in Distributed Mixed Reality Environments

Abstract

With the advances in sensors and computer networks an increased number of Mixed Reality (MR) applications require large amounts of information from the real world. Such information is collected through sensors (e.g. position and orientation tracking sensors). These sensors collect data from the physical environment in real-time at different locations and a distributed system connecting them must assure data distribution among collaborative sites at interactive speeds. We propose a new architecture for sensor based interactive distributed environments that falls in-between the atomistic peer-to-peer model and the traditional client-server model. Each node in the system is autonomous and fully manages its resources and connectivity. The dynamic behavior of the nodes is triggered by the human participants that manipulate the sensors attached to the nodes.