Ericsson, RWTH Aachen University, and the company Rovi MainConcept have started a collaborative research and development project called Connected Visual Reality (CoVR). The goal of the project is to substantially enhance the performance of audiovisual online communication and thus make it more popular.

Receiving funding of about €1.1 million from the EU and the NRW Innovation Ministry through the "Ziel2.NRW" program, which is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the CoVR research project is one of the winners in the HighTech.NRW competition.
Video conference and telepresence applications have high future potential. With these technologies, the efficiency and sustainability of operating procedures can be optimized ' for example through less need for business trips.

In order to increase the market potential of these types of applications, the technical capabilities of the corresponding communication systems must be expanded. High end systems and wide spread chat solution on the internet lack interoperability. The research project is also working on making it possible to use video conference and telepresence applications across various networks.

One goal of CoVR's research and development work is to develop technologies that can operate in heterogeneous networks and that allow for communication in HD quality. Video quality can be somewhat improved through more effective and scalable coding, while audio signal performance can be improved through intelligent background noise reduction, dereverberation, and echo cancellation.
Furthermore, under the new CoVR project new functions will be developed, which could considerably increase the appeal of the applications. The developed system should be able to provide constant content analysis of relayed audio and video signals, which when applied, for example, would visually highlight speakers and make them more recognizable within a group of conference participants.
The CoVR Partners Ericsson Eurolab, a distinguished research and development site for telecommunication companies, is heading the project.

Additionally, two internationally recognized RWTH Aachen institutes are involved in the project. For many years, the Institute of Communication Systems and Data Processing has been conducting research in the fields of digital transmission technology, channel and network simulation, speech coding, and language signal processing to improve audio quality.

The Institute of Communication Engineering primarily works in the field of video compression and content analysis of picture, video, and audio signals. The international reputation of the institute is based on its active involvement in standardization efforts for videos.

The Aachen company MainConcept is responsible for video compression and decompression in the CoVR project. MainConcept is a leading provider of video and audio codec solutions and has years of experience in the fields of encoding and decoding and pre- and postprocessing of audio and video signals.

Contacts
Ericsson GmbH (Germany) Lars Bayer
Press Office
Tel: +49 211 534 2692
Fax: +49 211 534 1431
de.presse@ericsson.com

RWTH Aachen

Institute of Communication Engineering
Tel: +49 241 80 27671
post@ient.rwth-aachen.de

Institute of Communication Systems and Data Processing
Tel: +49-241-80-26756
info@ind.rwth-aachen.de

MainConcept GmbH, Rovi Corporation
Chris Taylor
Tel: +1 (408) 562-3077
Chris.D.Taylor@rovicorp.com