MASAA: A Case Study in Building a Distributed Integrated Media Database

The possibility of immersing a user into a virtual environment is quickly becoming a reality. At the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) we are exploring the unique challenges presented by such systems in the context of our own implementation, the Media Immersion Environment (MIE). A challenging aspect of immersive environments is the persistent storage of vast amounts of heterogeneous data. In this report we present our efforts and experience in building a storage infrastructure for the MIE. The different characteristics, requirements, and heterogeneity of the encountered data present new challenges for their acquisition, storage, access, and analysis. In the context of a sample application, collaborative immersipresence, hosted on the MIE, we investigated these challenges in a realistic setting to build the current version of the MIE storage infrastructure. We report on our progress so far and describe remaining challenges, extensions, and future research directions. Copyright 2000 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of the Hawai’i International Conference On System Sciences, January 4-7, 2000, Maui, Hawaii.