Virtually Enhanced Real-life synchronizeD Interaction - ON the Edge

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Verdione targets cooperative applications that merge virtual elements into the real world. The main application example is a World Opera. The ultimate goal is for users, including musicians, actors, singers and spectators, to become immersed in a virtual reality that includes their local environment, and where users' arbitrary actions can be disseminated to their remote communication partners. The largest challenges that Verdione faces to satisfy the needs of users of the World Opera are to understand th e requirements and to explore the limits of delay and synchronity that the distributed system can provide. While delay and synchronity are already problematic for centralized, low-bandwidth applications, Verdione faces the challenge of supporting decentra lized applications with high-bandwidth requirements in a dynamic and heterogeneous environment. To improve Verdione's ability to react to network problems, network resilience is a key research topic. Resilience of the transport must be guaranteed to all ow for an undisturbed quality-of-perception for users even when network or node problems occur. Sometimes this will not be possible without major changes to the mechanisms that are used on the end-systems and in the network. This is addressed by researchi ng adaptivity. However, the adaptivity does not only cover configuration decisions, it addresses also the ability to make decisions that trade performance against quality and the decisions to make these adaptations. Moreover, dependability of services is in demand whenever customers invest trust in a system. The actors of Verdione will depend on systems that are based on the results of Verdione and require all of the aforementioned challenges to be solved. Finally, scalability is an important issue in di stributed applications that require high-bandwidth transport. Verdione is particularly challenging because its content is additionally time-dependent and the audiences are of unknown numbers.