This is a demonstration of real-time, high-resolution, high-definition communication with very low latency among multiple sites across the world. People at each site use very-high-quality video conferencing to communicate with the other sites and, in some cases, two-way, completely "uncompressed " (i.e., not compressed) raw HDTV is sent. The University of Washington developed this system in conjunction with the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP, ResearchChannel and AARNet. Other partners include SURFnet, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WIDE and APAC.
Each remote site transmits uncompressed HD video and audio via IP to receivers at the iGrid venue. Each received stream is "tiled" into a single HD stream that is multicast to all the remote sites. In addition, the current speaker is multicast to all the other sites as a single uncompressed HD stream. Participants see both a full-resolution picture of the speaker as well as a tiled display of all the remote videoconference participants. This is the first demonstration of 1.5Gb HD video multicast and the first multi-point videoconference using uncompressed HD.
A special session is planned with Larry Smarr, Calit2 director, UCSD computer science professor and iGrid host, extending a welcome from iGrid to the APAC '05 conference in Queensland, Australia. The APAC keynote by Ian Foster, senior scientist and head of the Distributed Systems Laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory and professor of computer science at University of Chicago, is delivered in high definition from Queensland to iGrid in San Diego.
URL:
www.pnw-gigapop.net
www.researchchannel.org/projects
www.aarnet.edu.au
www.wide.ad.jp
www.surfnet.nl
Contact:
Mike Wellings and Jim DeRoest, ResearchChannel, USA, wellings @ washington.edu, deroest @ washington.edu
Collaborators:
ResearchChannel, USA:
Mike Wellings, James DeRoest, Amy Philipson
University of Washington and Pacific Northwest GigaPoP, USA:
Jan Eveleth, Jacqueline Brown, Christopher Latham, Ron Johnson
AARNet, Australia:
George McLaughlin, Andrew Howard
Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC), Australia:
John O'Callaghan, Martin Lack SURFnet, NL: Egon Verharen
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA:
David Devereaux-Weber
WIDE, Japan:
Akira Kato
