Applied Research & Technology

IMTC, in conjunction with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), has developed an advanced traffic control center simulator for the US Department of Transportation. The system simulates the view of roadways as they might be seen from a camera overlooking a freeway. A user can horizontally pan up to 360 degrees as well as tilt vertically and zoom.

IMTC produced a computer animation for the inauguration of Dr. G. Wayne Clough, Georgia Tech's new president. The animation  looks toward the future, integrating a wealth of visual imagery with a new music score written especially for the occasion by composer James Oliverio, who also served as its producer. Actual video and photographs of research being done on the Tech campus were solicited from departments and laboratories across the campus, and many of the selected images were incorporated into the work.

IMTC has been working on a technology using video to extract images. The software we have developed can perform two functions in its current state: generation of panoramic images from controlled-panoramic video and generation of a side-view image from driving along a street at around 5-lOmph. We are planning to soon offer an Adobe Premiere plugin that will produce these images automatically from the source video. These images can be incoporated in most of the interactive panoramic viewers available today.

This new laboratory, based at the NCR worldwide financial headquarters in London, explores banking solutions to help NCR customers better serve their customers.

The Interactive Media Technology Center is involved in the technology of human motion capture, analysis, modeling and visualization. The laboratory collaborated with Frank Vitz and GVU to design a program called Motion Interactive. Motion Interactive is a software tool developed to aid in the visualization and analysis of human kinetics in the area of sports performance, character animation and rehabilitation. Data from motion capture equipment is input to MINT which then displays on a computer screen an animated 3D computer generated human-like figure.

IMTC developed a museum-wide database system for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. The system is designed to support all of the Museum's departments, including Education, Administration, Registration, Curatorial and Conservation. The database provides a number of advanced multimedia features, including the ability to store photographs of objects in the collection, photos showing the various stages of the conservation of an object, and video clips related to an object.

IMTC is a co-participant in the Large Scale Video Network Prototype project, or LSVNP. The project has established a managed test bed of services for videoconferencing and collaboration for use by researchers in the Southeast and in New York. The ViDe project is being jointly conducted with the University of Tennessee,  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and NYSENET. The program is sponsored by the Southeastern Universities Research Association and BBN – GTE Internetworking.

The Interactive Media Technology Center helped design and develop the Georgia Resource Center. Sponsored by Georgia Power's Office of Economic Development, the Center is an interactive, multimedia database about current Georgia industry.  Maps, community profiles, site data, and video is used to help find a suitable site to locate a business.

The Gesture Pendant allows ordinary household devices to be controlled, literally, with the wave of a hand. The user wears a small pendant that contains a wireless camera. The user makes gestures in front of the pendant that control anything from a home theater system, to lighting, to the kitchen sink. Therefore, hard to use, hard to understand remotes can be replaced with simple hand gestures. The pendant system can also analyze the user's movement as he/she makes gestures.

The purpose of this project was to design a system that would actively direct audio in desired directions and locations. Although there already exist proven methods of achieving this goal, including ultrasound modulation and sound direction by parabolic dishes, a digital signal processing (DSP) and antenna theory approach was developed for this system.