The 3DLife Project concept

The core objective of the 3DLife project is to create sufficient momentum by helping an existing large number of researchers and resources to integrate realistic, efficient and, to some extent, autonomic media communication and interaction over the Internet, and thus influence the long-term European research agenda in several important aspects of Media Internet.

Four important integrative activities (joint programmes of work) revolve around the project concept.

Specific Key Integration Objective. 3DLife aims at fostering the creation of sustainable and lasting relationships between existing national research groups. The project’s joint programme of activities targeting the realization of a VCE in Media Internet will be the flagship program to drive integration and ensure a lasting impact of the project.

Specific Key Technical Objective. 3DLife will build an open and expandable framework for collaborative research on Media interactive communication over the Internet. This framework will be based on a distributed repository of software tools: The 3DLife framework. To achieve this key goal 3DLife will integrate complementary expertise, enable resource optimization and sharing, and foster innovative research in Media Internet technology. It will interlink clusters of complementary technologies that so far have been growing almost independently from each other including, 3D multimedia signal processing, computer graphics, human computer interaction and human factors. The 3DLife framework will also enable clustering of costly and exclusive lab facilities and equipment available at partner’s premises to optimize their “Bringing the 3D Internet to Life” use. The networking and distributed interaction between modules and clusters will be supported by suitable interfaces.

Specific Key Pan-European Integration Objective. Pan-European integration is addressed by dedicated activities aiming at sharing lab facilities, technological developments and resources. The project’s objective in a Pan-European context is twofold:

• to reach out to other European institutions outside the core consortium, and
• to enable exchange of research personnel and sharing of available resources including dedicated equipment and lab facilities.

Focus will be given to research institutions and groups from the 12 new EU member states.

Specific Dissemination and Outreach Objective. 3DLife will generate a durable impact by implementing an effective plan for training of young researcher and dissemination of technologies available within the NoE. It will also implement an effective plan to:

• disseminate the technical developments of the network across the broad research community,
• provide means to bring the results beyond the research community to the EU citizen, and
• contribute to related Media Internet standardisation activities.