MPEG Media Context and Control (MPEG-M) Architecture
MPEG doc#: N11994
Date: March 2011
Authors: Jean Gelissen
Multimedia content is becoming omnipresent in everyday life, in terms of both consumption and production. Multimedia assets may stimulate also other senses than the traditional audio and visual senses, for instance olfaction, mechanoreception, equilibrioception, or thermoception. In addition to the audio-visual content of, e.g., a movie or a game, also other senses may be stimulated giving the feeling of being part of the particular media which shall result in a worthwhile, meaningful and consistent user experience.
MPEG-V (Media context and control), published in ISO/IEC 23005, provides an architecture and specifies associated information representations to enable the interoperability between virtual worlds, e.g., digital content provider of a virtual world, (serious) gaming, simulation, and with the real world, e.g., sensors, actuators, vision and rendering, robotics. The MPEG-V Part 1 specifies the Architecture of MPEG-V. MPEG-V is applicable in various business models / domains for which audiovisual contents can be associated with sensory effects that need to be rendered on appropriate sensory devices and / or benefit from well-defined interaction with an associated virtual world.
The strong / well-defined connection (defined by an architecture that provides interoperability trough standardization) between the virtual and the real world is needed to reach simultaneous reactions in both worlds to changes in the environment and human actions. Efficient, effective, intuitive and entertaining interfaces between users and virtual worlds are of crucial importance for their wide acceptance and use. To improve the process of creating virtual worlds a better design methodology and better tools are indispensible.
The MPEG-V standard consists of the following parts (The five first are illustrated in the figure, the other two are utilities): Part 1: Architecture, Part 2: Control information, Part 3: Sensor information, Part 4: Virtual World Object Characteristics, Part 5: Formats for Interaction Devices, Part 6: Common Types and Tools and Part 7: Conformance and Reference Software.
