Access Grid Retreat 2007 - ReportFrom Advanced Video Conferencing & Collaboration NZ1 July  Compiled by Nathan Gardiner, HIT Lab NZ - University of Canterbury
The Access Grid Retreat is an annual event involving users, developers, and researchers concerned with the Access Grid software and with collaboration research. The Retreat Program typically includes presentations suitable for people at all levels of technical understanding, from first time users to developers to researchers in collaborative technology and streaming media. The Access Grid Retreat is an ideal environment for the AG community to share recent experiences and research findings, to present ideas for future AG technical directions, and to train and educate AG newcomers. Two tracks of sessions allow participants to focus on either AG technical issues or activities related to AG operations.
Day One - 14th MayMorningIntroduction - Michael E. Papka
Opening Keynote - Jason Leigh Jason was the co-inventer of the Cave reality visualisation. Access Grid was visionary 10 years ago and now today industry has caught up with systems like Halo, Cisco and LifeSize. We are also seeing this trickle down to desktop computer with software like IChat and Skype. With this in mind we should probably re-examine Access Grid for the future. Moore's Law. The power and performance of networking is doubling every 9 months compared to computer processor power (18 months) and data storage (12 months). This will increase international connectivity substantially and allow for much greater data transfer speeds for the near future. Purchasing a 10Gbit network pipe for a university is much like investing in a telescope or similar important infrastructure. It is essential now. EVL created its first Access Grid node back in 1998. They were able to incorporate stereoscopic 3d displays using the Geowall software. They invented the AccessBot by using a plasma in portrait and displaying a person in a lifesize manner. In 2000 they created the Continuum which is a digital war room by using plasma screens for multiple site video conferencing, passive stereo projection screen, pdas and tile displays. The conclusions were that people could work faster in this environment and they preferred more screens and complained when they had to go back. They also preferred plasma screens. Wide Band Display (2003) was built which was 17 feet wide having 100 million pixel display. All the LCD panels were joined together to enable a big continuous display wall. SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) was created to handle all these display to enable multiple programs being run over the Wide Band Display. http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage. With LambdaVision students can use their laptop to connect wirelessly via VNC to put their desktops onto the Wide Band Display for collaboration. Visual Casting uses commodity clusters to provide a scalable way to broadcast realtime untra-high resolution content.. We've been able to demonstrate 5G visualcasting on single SAGE bridge node at SC06. Lessons learned from Wide Band Displays is:
Varrier (2004) is a stereoscopic LCD immersive environment. Dynallax (2006) is an improved stereo LCD immersive system. LCD makers are now coming out with 106" LCD screens so the technology is now coming available to be used in office and room environments and replace noteboards etc. Global Lambda Visualisation Facilities are around the world now in several universities. Low cost bandwidth and computing technology will continue to be key enablers in future generation collaboration environments. The role of universities and national labs in to push this bleeding edge of research just as AG did 10 years ago. The role of industry is to help.
State of the Access Grid - Tom Uram Tom has been the prject leader for Access Grid for the past 3 years. The vision of Access Grid is to model remote collaboration, have a scalable solution, make it secure and to support collaborative work. One of the biggest requests in a digital environment is to have a persistent virtual meeting space. People can leave their work and come back and continue to work. We wanted to make it simple for people to build on to the Access Grid. The key differences of Access Grid to standard video conferencing is:
The technology overview of AG uses the following tools: Remote Calls - ZSI SOAP, Data Transfer - FTP, Text Messaging - Jabber, Scheduling - RSS, Security - SSL. AG also has interoperability which means that other programs can interact with AG eg: jabber Upcoming AG3.1 release includes:
Deployment Review and Statistics
Audio and Video Collaboration is taking off including, Adobe Connect, Microsoft Groove, CISCO Telepresence, Halo, Google + Marratech. Data collaboration is being picked up all over the place including WebEx, GoToMeeting, document editing and sharing with Google Office etc. These sorts of tools are becoming mainstream and with the Access Grid you could potentially create plugins. Future Work
The SUMOVER Project - Socrates Varakliotis Over the last few years there was limited funds and support for media tools but now with the SUMOVER project it is providing fresh impetus. It is a JISC funded project for 2 years and finishes in July 2007. It resulted from UKERNA e-Science videoconf reports. UCL has a long history of maintaining the media tools. The aims and objectives are to:
VIC latest features include windwos DirectX grabber (already shipped with AG3 VIC), new image overlay/logo, new codec H261as (VP interoperability), update for MacOSX 10.4.6, Source Specific Multicast (SSM) support, windows nullsoft installer script to auto generate installer and various stabilisation fixes. The VIC AG release shortly will include H.264 (compliant with RFC 3984) and MPEG4, full screen mode, autoplace control, optional windows menu and borders. RAT latest features a new look GUI, dynamic address/port rebinding, security padlock to indicate when encryption is enabled, further fixes to ALSA driver and updated mixer controls, windows nullsoft installer and stabilisation updates including windows driver fixes and long running RAT crash bug fixed. Licensing of the tools are generally under BSD style license. The plan for the next 3 months is to continue to stabilise common code base, support the AG community as much as possible by ensuring any problems with the AG release are quickly remedied, make final release under SUMOVER, investigate issues with newer platforms and hardware, iron out H.264 and interoperability, and explore new avenues for funding. http://mediatools.cs.ucl.ac.uk
AfternoonAG through the Looking Glass - Michael Daley Current irritation for Access Grid sessions is lack of cues to indicate and locate the active user. Looking at creating a new video interface to stream videos in a carousel type shape. The carousel is linked to the incoming audio stream and the video will be brought to the front. As graphics cards are becoming more powerful it is now possible to think of new ways to display videos interactively. For example what if your desktop was actually a 3D environment. SUN have recently launched three new projects that show great potential for future immersive collaborative environments:
Looking at ways to incorporate AG into CAVE and 3D environments and also using 3D LCD displays such as SHARP's 3D LCD and Actius RD3D & AL3D laptops.
Realtime Compression for High Res Content - Luc Renambot
Highlights of compression of HD and SHD, HD bandwidth required is 250Mb/s at 30fps, SHD bandwidth required is 990Mb/s at 30fps. DXT compressions is compressions by reduction of colours. It converts a 4x4 pixel block to 8 bytes and it is a fixed data rate. It uses a native OpenGL texture format and decompresses by GPU. HD streaming using BlackMagic HDMI capture card can bring low latency HD video streams. http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/fastdxt
An enhanced Shared Presentation Tool for AG - Sangwoo Han Online collaboration tools are being increasingly used in health/medical research. Possible solutions extend interactivity and funtionality of current AG browser and presentation, add screen streaming and VNC. Screen streaming transmits snapshots and the refresh rate is not high to show mouse movements. Limitations of VNC requires giving control of the whole computer to the remote user. It also requires a separate VNC server. NLM's enhanced shared presentation and browser hopes to overcome these issues. Enhanced Shared Presentation Tool allows you to have a take control button and once you have control all other participants will see your mouse movements and you can change presentation slides. A downloadable plugin will be available shortly on the Access Grid website.
Extending VIC for DV/HDV in the Access Grid - Christopher Willing What is high quality? It has to be better than H.261 and better or equal to PAL/NTSC. This project we're targetting the DV (firewire) interface. The reason for staying with VIC is that it is familiar, cross platform, easy to integrate into the AG toolkit, allows multiple streams. The reason not for going with DVTS is that it is not really cross platform compatible and doesn't really handle multiple streams. DV: 25Mb/s +ctl & audio = 30Mb/s HDV: 25Mb/s fixed by in-camera MPEG2 encoder Network tuning is required for this. Network buffers sizes may need to be adjusted. How do you still bring in low bandwidth sites? One way is to send a H.261 duplicate stream. The new DVProducer Service sends video on different multicast addresses. You can select which DV stream you want to receive rather than receiving them all at once and overloading your network. Current status is that Linux is working with this fully, and Windows XP is not too far off from being available. Hardware requirements are:
Information and downloadable version now available at http://www.vislab.uq.edu.au Day Two - 15th MayMorninginSORS Update - Jim Miller inSORS is alway competing againsts the 'Big Boys' - Polycom and Tandberg. Chevron is moving towards naming inSORS the corporate standard replacing Tandberg. The more notable customers currently using inSORS are BP & Honeywell. They have created mobile versions right down to handheld devices due to the technology and wireless network advances. inSORS has rebranded itself and now has a new name - IOCOM.
Global Quality Assurance Program - Jason Bell History of QA was introduced by the UK Access Grid support centre. Australia started this also to improve the quality of AG rooms. Preparations for the Global QA process has been in development for the past year and is now ready to be implemented. THe new QA program includes:
The Access Grid QA process provides a method to assess AG based upon a number of criteria - audio quality, video quality, networking, shared software and applications. The QA program is all about improving the User Access Grid Experience. Building an AG and having it work is only half the job completed. People are happy to fund research projects but not general running costgs. People will spend money on better computer hardware, but who don't really consider funding better lighting. Some people are looking at other video conferencing technologies due to poor experiences with AG sessions. Funding often relies on outcomes. QA program is not based on any hardware. As long as you pass the test - that's all that matters. The easiest way to test your AG room is to get a laptop with headphones and hear your room audio. QA Tutorials - http://www.accessgrid.org/node/352 Introduction to QA - http://www.accessgrid.org/node/493 QA Templates - http://www.accessgrid.org/node/705 Improving the AG Experience - Javier Gomez Alonso Growth of UK based nodes has been steady since 2004 and there are now just under 100 room nodes currently. Access Grid Support Centre provides general support for all nodes, documentation, quality assurance, training and core AG services. Services include:
2006 Survey - top three problems were connecting to venues (firewall, multicast), problem sites (untrained node operators), poor audio quality (background hiss, tinny voices). Three top improvement requests - more reliable, greater coverage, and better audio. One good idea has been to provide mouse mats with common and important information for the end user. In the near future, UK will be releasing an online QA room where you can go in and test your node yourself. http://www.mc.manchester.ac.uk/about/people/gomez_alonso
AfternoonUsing SRB for large data handling in AG - Christopher Willing Shared applications are what make the Access Grid more than just "video conferencing on steriods". Scientific and engineering applications generate large amounts of distributed data but how do we incorporate these data sets and collections into the Access Grid? We are using the shared application to bring together the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) into the Access Grid. Future work is AG Data Store Integration and Data Search Capabilities.
Community Building in Distance Learning Environments - Daniel Eiland Using uncompressed HD video as a mediom for interactivity, multiple technologies as a method for increased site and student participation, ease of interaction to encourage experts in various fields to be willing to instruct via distance learning environments, and finally because we can. Primarily using UltraGrid as the software for HD. For those who couldn't transmit or receive HD they used Access Grid in addition.
Ideas, Benefits, Outomes for NZ Access Grid
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