Read the interview with George Xylomenos and his winning proposal: Telepresence-Enhanced Network Music Performance (TENeMP)
George Xylomenos and AUEB
The TENEMP project will be carried out by the Mobile Multimedia Laboratory (MMLab), which specialises on computing, communications and media. The lab is part of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) in Greece. The MMlab has a long involvement with research in Network Music Performance (NMP) and has its own professional capture, recording, mixing and monitoring equipment; it is also directly connected to an optical backbone and has access to audio and visually isolated conferencing rooms. The team is led by Dr. George Xylomenos, professor at AUEB, who has been involved with NMP for more than 10 years.
Can you give a brief overview of your winning proposal?
What are its key objectives and innovative aspects?
The TENeMP project will use the SPIRIT infrastructure to conduct experiments with NMP applications over 5G and immersive telepresence. NMP can be a great showcase for both 5G and telepresence: its stringent latency requirements can only be supported by ultra-low latency 5G links and the availability of nearby edge computing resources to host multiparty communication servers. Real-life presence, which is essential for both performance and teaching, can only be achieved by exploiting immersive telepresence technologies that allow the participants to hear and see each other from multiple vantage points, rather than as flat images. We will evaluate the feasibility of different NMP scenarios and topologies over pure 5G and mixed 5G networks and explore different ways of supporting multiparty scenarios by exploiting edge computing resources. Moreover, we will integrate telepresence technologies such as holographic communications and avatar-based presence with NMP tools to provide a unified experience for NMP-based performance and education.
What motivated you to apply for the SPIRIT Open Call?
The SPIRIT Open Call provides a unique opportunity to reassess the feasibility of NMP applications, which are currently restricted by the latency of traditional networks and the flat views offered by plain video cameras. The access to the 5G testbed and the telepresence enablers offered by SPIRIT will be fully exploited by the TENeMP project. The project will experiment with both the low latency and edge computing capabilities of 5G (to assess feasibility) and advanced holographic and avatar-based communications enablers (to explore AR-enhanced operation). Using real 5G and telepresence technologies (instead of simulators and emulators) allows for a more realistic performance assessment, enhances the credibility of the reported results and, in turn, heavily increases the visibility and the impact of our experiments. The showcase that will be setup as part of the project will be a highly visible demonstrator of the 5G and telepresence capabilities of SPIRIT.
How do you envision this project making an impact?
5G is a very promising architecture for NMP as it offers ultra-low latency and flexible function placement for multiparty conference servers. Holographic and avatar-based telepresence are invaluable for NMP, as personal interaction is paramount for both performance and teaching, requiring different vantage points for the observation of other musicians. NMP is an application that is gender-neutral but whose social impact can be very important in addressing gender issues and disabilities. Music performance and education requires live meetings between participants, which are hard to do in areas where women are restricted in their movements and activities. Similarly, people with disabilities who find it hard to travel to such meetings can access music performance and education from their residences. NMP can also have a great impact on cultural heritage, allowing traditional musicians to transmit their knowledge to remote students, enabling a new generation of urban students to learn traditional instruments.