Project Number:
Telematics for Research 4007
Project Title:
MECCANO
1.
Title of Deliverable:
Consolidation of Applications
Deliverable ID:
R8.1
Produced by Workpackage:
WP8
Contractual Date of Delivery:
March 31, 1999
Author(s):
Kjell Åge Bringsrud and Tarik Cicic,
University of Oslo
Abstract:
Based on the results of the MERCI project, the MECCANO project aims to
integrate technology components to allow for developement of tools for
multimedia collaboration.
Every tool developed within the project is tested by a validation workpage –
the feedback is then used to improve that tool. All tests are performed under
”real” conditions of a given scenario handled by the WP8, ”Consolidation of
Applications Workpackage”, e.g. lecturing at a distance, seminars and
distributed virtual meetings.
This deliverable consists of this paper describing several real-life examples of
the use of the MECCANO multimedia conferencing tools, together with
comments and snap shots of the actual events.
Keyword list:
Multimedia Conferencing, Seminars, Distance Education, MBone
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1. Introduction.
The main activities in WP8 are concerned with testing and validation of various distributed
applications using MBone and the MECCANO tools. The MECCANO tools will to a large
extent consist of the tools developed in the MERCI project, some of which are subject to
further refinements and some new ones will evolve. The main MECCANO tools are SDR,
VIC, RAT, NTE and WB which are further described in ref.<1> to <6>.
The validation efforts during the first year have mainly addressed the quality of service
obtained during the MECCANO project meetings held weekly using the video conferencing
tools as well as some seminars and demonstrations performed during the reporting period.
Study of the tools used in education at a distance and various other applications will follow in
the second period.
2. Infrastructure.
Both connectivity and quality of service have varied considerably on MBone during the last
year. This has mainly been due to high packet losses in overloaded routers, bad connections
and incompatibility problems between the network providers.
Fig.1 Observation of Network status on MECCANO meeting August 10, 1998
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The MBone transport quality during some of the MECCANO project meetings has been
monitored by Andreas Rozek at RUS, and some of his observations are documented on
http://www-ks.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/PROJ/MECCANO/. A typical scenario is shown in Fig.1
which reflects the situation during the meeting on August 10´th 1998, showing a rather poor
connectivity between the project partners. The underlying data for this map was collected
from a set of ”mtrace” measurements between all participants of the given session and
produced by the ”MeshTrace” program. This is of course a static map which cannot show
variations over time for e.g. the loss rates on the routers involved (i.e a number of ”mtrace”
invocations for the same pair of participants will show a considerable range of loss rates for
the same routers). The map in Fig. 1 is based on a number of observations of the network over
a certain period of time, thus giving a kind of average view of the network situation during
this period.
In many instances where network problems have been experienced, it has been documented
that these stems from connections and/or routing problems in the national networks.
Therefore, continuous dialogues with the national network providers are taking place in order
to make them improve the transmission quality on the national MBone as well as to improve
their interoperability with other European networks.
Some of the partners in MECCANO (UCL, Inria and RUS) are involved in an alpha-test of
the upcoming ”TEN-155” network, which will provide managed bandwith services on a
European level (see http://www.dante.net/ten-155.html/). The primary example of such a service
was the JAMES project, which provided point to point ATM VCs which were free to use at
point of consumption, but offered limited and inflexible access. The TEN-155 network plans
to offer a service which is similar to that offered by JAMES in many ways, but more flexible
and easier to access and manage. The goal being to ”extend coverage of ATM based
connections and virtual private network to all National Research Networks (NRNs) connected
to TEN-155”. The official TEN-155 launch took place in Essen, Germany on the 25. – 26.
February during the opening of the Fifth Framework Programme. MECCANO gave a
demonstration of a multimedia conference and a presentation at this event (see below).
Eutelsat has for some time provided a 3 Mbit/s satellite link with support for multicast
transmission (DBS) for experimental use in MECCANO. This link is provided free of charge,
and enables data to be received enywhere in Europe via a 80cm satellite antenna and a PC
with FreeBSD and a receiving card. Eutelsat has also provided the project with 5 receiving
cards, surrently under installation at RUS, ACC, UiO, UCL and Univ. of Bremen. Work is
going on in order to integrate the use of satellite links with MBone and to test out the
MECCANO tools in this context.
3. Electronic Project Meetings.
In spite of the connectivity problems described above, most project meetings were carried out
in an acceptable way using the MECCANO video conferencing tools. Sometimes, however,
connectivity was close to zero (like on the meeting November 9´th), and for a specific
participant following all meetings, the sound and video quality would show wide variations
over the period which are reported for.
On some occations, connectivity, network performance and participation were close to good,
and the power of the MECCANO conferencing tools were fully documented. One such
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occation was the management meeting on January 11´th 1999 where 19 people participated. A
snap shot of the VIC and RAT windows on this event is shown below (as sen from RUS).
Fig.2: VIC and RAT windows for MECCANO meeting Jan.11´th 1999.
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As it can be seen, Roy Bennett was speaking at the time the snap shot was taken; the other 18
listening in. Not all of the participants are visible in the video window as experienced from
RUS, but certainly most of them are seen with good quality.
Most of the MECCANO tools have been refined and upgraded with added functionality
during the last year. In particular, work has been performed in order to make NTE more stable
and to add symmetric encyption support to SDR. However, only a small fraction of the
problems experienced during the video conferencing sessions can be refered back to the
Mecano tool set, which can be characterized as stable. As mentioned earlier, work still
remains to be done in order to achieve a more stable MBone accross Europe.
4. MECCANO seminars.
Two seminars have been held from the HP labs. in Bristol. The first one was intended to
demonstrate the use of slide presentation embedded in IP multicast videoconferencing during
the official opening of the new facilities at the HP labs on June 5´th 1998. The seminar went
very well with a fair amount of participants. The video and sound quality was acceptable as
seen from UCL, and documented on Fig.2 below.
Fig.3: Seminar from HP labs Bristol June 5´th 1998
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The second seminar from the HP labs was held on October 7´th, where Colin Krawchuck
gave a presentation on user interaction in virtual environments. Title: ”Would you buy a used
PC from this avatar?”, see ref.<7> for more info. This seminar used the same tools as the
previous one from the HP labs. A snap shot take from UCL of this seminar is shown on Fig.4
below.
Fig.4: Seminar at HP labs. October 7´th 1998
A last seminar in this period of reporting was held on February 1´th 1999.This seminar was
organized by Jochen Lienhard from the University of Freiburg . A presentation named
“Authoring on the Fly: A Method of Integrating (Tele-)Presentations and Multimedia
Production”, was given by Wolfgang Hürst.
The main objective of the seminar was to introduce and test the “authoring on the fly” (AOF)
toolkit. This toolkit includes a complete system for creating, transmitting, storing and
reproducing multimedia content to be used in distributed presentations (see
http://ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/mmgroup.projects.meccano ). The AOF whiteboard (AOFwb) was
used in addition to the standard MECCANO audio and video tools.
In addition to plain presentation of the prepared material, AOFwb allows the lecturer to
interactively edit texts, point to or outline parts of the text, show high resolution graphics etc.
(see Fig.5). The whole presentation is recorded with the synchronization information and can
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be reproduced later. For this purpose a synchronization tool (AOFsync, see Fig. 6) is used.
AOFsync has a simple and effective graphical interface, allowing the user to reproduce the
presentation sequentially as well as to reproduce any desired portion by using the thumbnail
control.
Participation on the seminar was not very good due to connectivity problems experienced by
many partners. Five partners participated, and had good sound quality but the video part was
missing at some of the sites. AOFrec worked fine.
Fig.5: Example showing the use of AOFwb
Fig.6: AOFsync
5. Demonstrations and presentations.
A talk on ”Secure Internet Multimedia Conferencing”, and a demo of the MECCANO tools
and the MECCANO security features for Internet conferencing took place at det ACM
Multimedia 98 conference in Bristol, September 14. – 16. 1998. It was considerable interest
for this demo, even though security is difficult to demonstrate.
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At the IST Vienna conference, November 30 – December 2, the use of MMCR through the
CoBrow web interface was successfully demonstrated.
Finally, on thursday, February 25´th 1999, during the official launch of ”TEN-155” in the
context of a conference to launch the Fifth Framework Programme, MECCANO
demonstrated the benefit of a pan-european broadband network with a multimedia conference
between UCL, INRIA and RUS. The demonstration was accompanied by a presentation of the
MECCANO project, it´s tool box and further plans, and was very successfull. A snapshot
from this demo is shown on Fig. 7 below. A comprehensive collection of snap shots from this
event can be found at http://www-ks.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/PROJ/MECCANO/Snapshots/990225_155/.
Fig.7: Snapshot from the demo at the TEN-155 Official Launch, Feb. 25´th 1999.
6. Summary.
During the period of time reported for, MBone to a large extend has suffered from overload
problems and connectivity problems as well as some incompatibilty problems between the
national research networks. This inevitably has lead to difficulties regarding the various use of
the MECCANO tools whish was anticipated when the project started. For instance, the project
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intend to perform most of its project meetings on the Internet using the MECCANO
multimedia conferencing tools. Due to the varying quality of service on MBone, this intention
has been difficult to achieve, leading to additional work for the partners. Nevertheless, most
of the scheduled meetings have been carried out (with partners accepting a broad range of
MBone QoS), and several seminars and demonstrations at international conferences have
been performed successfully. Continuing efforts are made in order to encurrage national end
international network providers to upgrade their MBone functionality.
The MECCANO Multimedia Conferencing Tools have been refined in several ways during
the report period. Among others, this includes upgrading of RAT with high quality sound,
inclusion of H.263 in VIC (on an experimental bases), bug fixing in NTE, inclusion of SIP
and security in SDR and launching of new versions of the AOFwb/AOFrec presentation tools.
These efforts has considerably improved the functionality of the MECCANO multimedia
tools, and work with further refinements is in progress.
7. Acknowledgements.
UCL, London: Roy Bennett (screen snapshots, demos)
RUS, Stuttgart: Andreas Rozek (snapshots, network performance, demos)
UF, Freiburg: Jochen Lienhard (seminar)
HP Labs, Bristol, Pat Baker and Alberto Casu (seminars)
8. References.
<1>
<2>
<3>
<4>
<5>
<6>
<7>
”User Guide for SDR v2.5”, UCL Sept. 1998
”User Guide for VIC v2.8”, UCL, Sept. 1998
”User Guide for RAT v3.0.23”, UCL Sept. 1998
Edmund Whelan: ”Secure Conferencing User Guide”, Sept. 1998
”Introduction to Multimedia Conferencing”, UCL, Sept. 1998
Software download: http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/
Supplementary info on HP seminar, Oct.7´th 1998:
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/projects/MECCANO/seminars/
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