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Digitally Merged Environments
Project Overview

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Principal Researchers
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Principal Researchers

The lead institution is McGill University. The partner institution in California is the University of California - San Diego.

The McGill team is the Ultra-Videoconferencing Research Group based in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology. The members are Jeremy Cooperstock, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with expertise in human-computer interaction and networking technologies, Wieslaw Woszczyk, James McGill Professor of Music and recently President of the Audio Engineering Society, with specialization in sound recording, audio technology and acoustics and John Roston, Adjunct Professor of Music Research, with expertise in broadcast video technology and display systems. The Group has done a number of “world first” demonstrations of very high quality video and audio transmission over broadband networks at very low latency. It received the “Most Innovative Use of New Technology” citation at the 2005 SuperComputing Conference Bandwidth Challenge in Seattle. In addition to applications in music, the team has been working on medical training simulations and ocean science seafloor observation systems.

The UC San Diego team is based in the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. Sheldon Brown, the Director, is an artist who works in new forms of culture that arise out of the developments of computing technology and extend and intersect the fields of computer gaming and scientific visualization. He is a Professor of Visual Arts and the founding director of the new Center for Next Generation Digital Media and The Experimental Game Lab. Peter Otto is schooled in the language and aesthetics of media expression as well as advanced hardware/software design, facilities design and networking applications. Classically trained in musical performance and composition, he is Technology Director/Faculty in Music and Head of Research & Development in the newly established Sonic Arts initiative. Shahrokh Yadegari is a composer, sound designer and producer with a background in electrical engineering and media arts. He is currently Head of Design at the department of Theatre and Dance .

The University of Manitoba team is based in the Experimental Media Centre, a new trans-disciplinary initiative with interests in stereo capture, transmission & projection, spatial audio, high speed networks, architecture, networked social interaction, music and visualization, complex improvisation, environmental content and immersive environments for public participation . The Director is Herbert Enns, Professor of Architecture, who curated Canada’s representation at the 2007 Lisbon Architecture Triennalle. Gordon Fitzell, Assistant Professor of Music, teaches music theory and composition . They have collaborated with the team at UC San Diego on the project “Rich Spatial Networks.”

The UC Berkeley team is based in the Tele-immersion Group and collaborates with the UC Davis team on a telepresence system that captures, reconstructs and displays in real time a complete 256 by 256 by 256 spatial resolution of a complete 360 degree surface from a person at 24 frames /second without requiring any markers or special devices on the user. Ruzena Bajcsy at UC Berkeley is the recipient of two honorary degrees and numerous awards including the Allen Newell Award of ACM/AAAI and the Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. She was named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover Magazine in 2002. Bernd Hamann at UC Davis is Professor of Computer Science and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. He was Co-Director of the Center for Image Processing and Integrated Computing, now called the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization.

The University of Victoria team is based in the NEPTUNE Canada project. The $100M project will transform ocean sciences through bringing abundant power and high bandwidth communications for the world’s first regional cabled ocean observatory, hosting hundreds of subsea sensors on an 800 km undersea IP network to understand Earth-ocean processes. Chris Barnes has been the Project Director since 2002 and leads a team of 30 staff and with scores of participating scientists. He is a member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of an honourary degree and numerous awards including the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal. Benoit Pirenne is the project’s Associate Director for Information Technology and has responsibility for the Data Management and Archive System, a vast interactive database using Web Services and developing an Oceans 2.0 social network framework.

The team at UC Santa Barbara is based in the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) Program, a trans- disciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, and electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. George Legrady is Director of the Experimental Visualization Lab in the MAT doctoral program. His pedagogical focus is on synthesizing artistic research and content development with significant engineering processes to achieve tomorrow’s hybrid artist/engineers and engineer/artists. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology and the Allosphere Research Laboratory, a three-story metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets. 

Michael McGuffin is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at École de technologie supérieure. He has expertise in design, prototyping, and evaluation of graphical user interfaces, interaction techniques, and visualization, particularly interactive visualizations of 3D volumetric data (such as 3D medical images) and visualizations of graph or network data (such as biological networks of interacting proteins).

The team at Stanford University is based in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and the H-STAR Institute. Chris Chafe is Director of CCRMA which has investigated physical factors affecting music production such as bidirectional audio delay, audio/video sync and space and geometry cues. His team has engineered new methods and applications for audio transport, QoS evaluation and connection management. Keith Devlin is Executive Director of H-STAR, the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute, an interdisciplinary research center focusing on people and technology, how technology affects people's lives, and the innovative use of technologies in research, education, art, business, entertainment, communication, national security, and other walks of life.

Luc Courchesne is Director of the School of Industrial Design at the Université de Montréal. His interests include complex data visualization in real-time involving data collection and sorting, data interpretation and organization, dynamic 3D modeling, immersive displays and interactive manipulation tools as well as the use of broadband networks to allow decentralized teamwork through telepresence.

The team at the Ontario College of Art and Design is based in the Faculty of Design. Martha Ladly is an Associate Professor with experience in design for mobile situations, experiences, devices, interfaces, and applications and with large, successful, multidisciplinary, collaborative digital media research creation, within located, co-located, distant, and distributed research partnerships.

Pierre Boulanger is Director of the Advanced Man-Machine Interface Laboratory at the University of Alberta which has as a goal the development of systems that provide us with better understanding of complex and dynamic environments. His interests include 3D computer vision , virtualized reality systems , collaborative virtual environments , tele-immersion and medical imaging.