SPECIAL ISSUES IN INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA FOR TELE-PRESENCE OPERATIONS Geza Haidegger*, Tibor Szalay**, Szilveszter Drozdik* * MTA SZTAKI (Computer and Automation Research Institute). Budapest Hungary haidegger@S::taki.hu dro::dik@s::taki.hu ** Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Hungary s::ala)·@manufbme.hu Abstract: An active research and development co-operation has been established to formulate a consortium with academic and industrial partners to work on various aspects of digitising factory IT processes. This paper details some of the research activities devoted to implementing tele-presence features with interactive multimedia solutions. Copyright © 2003 IFA C Keywords: tele-presence, interactive multimedia, SW development 1. INTRODUCTION Information technology developments has given faith to system designers, to plan for a new generation of manufacturing environment. Some experts tend to call this new era as DIGITAL revolution in manufacturing, and foresee a time in the near future, when the "paper-less office" will be replacing the present workplaces. In a similar process as the design and planning, also the execution and control of the manufacturing processes in a factory will (or could) run in a paper-less style, and this vision has led to the birth of a new topic: '"running a digital factory". Our consortium, consisting of a large and a small industrial enterprise, 2 departments from 2 separate Hungarian universities - and our academic research institute has selected certain subtopics to get prepared for the new age of running '"digital factories" as described in [Mon2002]. This presentation gives a short overview of a joint research and development work carried out by the consortium members in a specific field of foreseen future manufacturing: trying to offer solutions for interactive multimedia applications for specific telc- presence needs. The project has reached its mid-term, and the implementation and test phase will soon allow us to evaluate our preliminary research results. Further important aspects of the research project, e.g. topics on Constraint -based scheduling for production planning and artificial neural networks' training and application are detailed in other papers of this workshop, and in [Erd2002], [Vih2002]. 2. OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH DOMAIN There are several fields within a factory environment, where it is essential to involve human experts to observe, to test, to control and to feel the details of the production processes, both in the design and the planning stages, and during the manufacturing, testing and verification processes. As soon as digital technology reaches a complexity within the environment, appropriate digital communication and information processing subsystems can meet the above listed user requirements. These new features raise the quality level, the efficiency, the observability and controllability of the production, but also allow the customer and end-user to actively take part in the processes of manufacturing.