Equipment Acquisition to Enhance IMSC Education and Research Programs

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funding in partial support of acquisition of equipment to upgrade the network infrastructure of the Integrated Media Systems Engineering Research Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California from the existing local area network to a wide area network. The equipment is being used to establish a new telepresence laboratory, improve the performance and lower the cost of realistic, textured, animated rendering and avatar data extraction for telepresence applications to support multimedia research. The equipment includes ATM Network hardware upgrades and connections to the Next Generation Internet, real-time encoders/decoders for full D1-rate video compression, high performance graphics workstations, network attached storage, wireless ultra-wideband impulse radio transceivers, and 3D immersive display an eye human-computer interface devices. The facilities will enable more than 25 faculty and staff and more than 100 students to attack the hardware and software barriers that limit the creation, dissemination, and access to multimedia information. The equipment will support multidisciplinary research and education in the process of solving cutting-edge systems-level problems that require final solution assessment by design, simulation, and implementation.