STI: UltraGrid: A High Definition Collaboratory

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Despite extensive research in techniques, protocols and technology, progress in providing usable and widely deployed teleconferencing applications has been limited. Commercial products are limited to small groups, or to unidirectional, non-interactive, streaming. Research oriented systems, such as the Access Grid, support larger groups and more flexible communication patterns, but have very limited support for high quality video formats and are fragile due to their reliance on old technology. The resulting system will greatly exceed current implementations in terms of quality, robustness and consistent operation; yet it can be developed primarily as an exercise in systems integration. It will facilitate wide area collaborative research and information sharing, improve reliability and performance of networked conferencing, and forma solid basic for the future development of more advanced systems and technologies. The project will build a video teleconferencing tool to enable large-scale, flexible and ad-hoc collaboration. This tool will be structured to act as a building block for the development of future applications. It will be built on previous work with high quality video and robust networked audio, and integrate the results of research into teleconferencing systems architecture with modern, high resolution, video capture and display devices.