Progress in technology has led to the development of new forms of media technologies and services in the areas of virtual, augmented and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR). New imaging modalities, such as texture-plus-depth, light field, point cloud, and holographic imaging are the digital signals at the core of these media technologies. Many challenges remain in developing useful and practical data representation formats, data coding and compression tools, communication protocols, subjective and objective quality of experience (QoE) measurement metrics and methods, and related International Standards and Recommendations.
Net4U research lab is contributing to these challenges with fundamental and applied research within national and international funded research projects and with active participation to related international standardization projects within ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 (Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information).
Net4U is also carrying on research on the new Immersive Metaverse waves. Metaverse is a 3D space where real people can move, share and interact through avatars. The idea is to furnish the best interface to interact with multimedia objects. The Immersive Metaverse requires a physical device connected to Virtual Reality headsets, to manage them and move in the Metaverse world. Net4U research provides physical-free-device interaction, imparting gestures and movement directly with hands. Therefore, no more joypad, keyboard, or mouse are needed to interact with the multimedia application. A hand gesture recognition dataset has been collected and used to train light neural networks to interact with the multimedia world.