| Summary: | 博士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊工程學系 === 103 === Networked virtual environments (NVEs) and Internet of Things (IoT) have been the most potential and the most anticipated technologies in these years, which may bring us new decisive applications of informational technologies and push people toward a new lifestyle. In this dissertation, we propose a framework to put the concept of IoT toward practice in NVE, and design an immersive voice communication scheme to provide NVE users with the immersive experience to converse with neighbor users.
We propose a new paradigm, the Networked Virtual Environment of Things (NVEoT), to integrate real-world smart things and real-world avatars/objects in networked virtual environments so that entities in either worlds can interact with each other in a real-time manner. To prove the NVEoT concept, we design a hierarchical smart gateway, REX, to embody smart things as RESTful resources that can be combined with networked virtual environments (NVEs) to realize the integration and the interaction of the virtual environments and the real world. In addition, we implement a NVEoT-based NVE, called X-Campus, for guiding visitors to navigate a building of National Central University to verify the feasibility of NVEoT. This implementation shows the NVEoT framework works properly.
In order to evaluate how to efficiently and practically apply data communication technologies in NVEs, we propose a voice communication scheme, called immersive voice communication (IVC), to provide NVE users with the immersive experience to hear the voice of neighbor users within the area of interest (AOI). IVC is a peer-to-peer based scheme, so it does not impose too many extra loads on the original NVE system. It further uses a relation model to classify neighbors of an avatar into listeners and the overhearers, and allocates less bandwidth to the latter than to the former for reducing the voice data traffic without sacrificing the user experience. IVC is also a latency- and bandwidth-aware scheme. It adopts the network coordinate system (NCS) to help construct the adaptive k-ary tree (AK-tree) to reduce the voice data transmission latency and efficiently utilize the bandwidth. As shown by the simulation results, the proposed scheme outperforms other related schemes. We also implement IVC and integrate it with a spatialized voice rendering mechanism to realize an networked virtual gallery guiding system for evaluating the user experience of IVC under the technology acceptance model (TAM). The TAM analysis results show that users consider IVC helpful and easy to use, and thus have high intention to use IVC.
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