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Project Number: Telematics for Research 4007

Project Title: MECCANO

Title of Deliverable: Description of, and conclusions from, the seminars carried out in the first year

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:

The MECCANO project is building on the results of the MERCI project, but is integrating further technology components into the tools to improve their utility for multimedia collaboration.

The tools used by the project are proven in the activities of the validation workpage (WP8, Consolidation of Applications); the feedback from these activities is used to improve the tools. A vital aspect of these activities is the use of the tools under the "real" conditions of remote lecturing, seminars and distributed virtual meetings.

This deliverable describes several examples of the use of the MECCANO multimedia conferencing tools in such activities during the first ten months of the project, together with comments on and snap shots of the actual events.

Keyword list:

Multimedia Conferencing, Seminars, Distance Education, Mbone

 

 

  1. Introduction.

    2. The main activities in WP8 are concerned with testing and validation of various distributed applications using Mbone and the MECCANO tools. The MECCANO tools consist largely of the tools developed in the MERCI project, some with further refinements, but some new ones will evolve. The main MECCANO tools are SDR, VIC, RAT, NTE and WB/WBD. The software and various User Guides are available for Unix and Windows platforms [1] - [4].

    The validation efforts during the first year have mainly addressed the Quality of Service (QoS) 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 distance education and various other applications will follow in the second period.

     

  2. Network Infrastructure.

    3. Both connectivity and QoS 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: Network status during a MECCANO meeting 10th August 1998

    The Mbone transport quality during some of the MECCANO project meetings has been monitored by Andreas Rozek at RUS, some of whose observations are documented on the World Wide Web [5]. A typical scenario is shown in Fig.1 which reflects the situation during the meeting on 10th August 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 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 an average view of the network situation during this period. It can be viewed more clearly on the web site referenced above.

    In many instances where network problems have been experienced, it has been documented that these stem from connection and/or routing problems in the national networks. Therefore, we maintain continuous dialogues with the national network providers in order to persuade them to improve both the transmission quality on the national Mbone and interoperability with other European networks.

    The MECCANO partners UCL, INRIA and RUS are involved in the alpha-test of the TEN-155 network [6], which provides managed bandwith services on a European level. TEN-155 offers a service in some ways similar to that offered by the earlier JAMES project, 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". MECCANO demonstrated multimedia conferencing and made a presentation (see Section 5 below) at the official TEN-155 launch which took place in Essen, Germany on the 25th –26th February 1999 during the opening of the Fifth Framework Programme.

    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 via an uplink at INRIA; it 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, currently under installation at RUS, ACC, UiO, UCL and Univ. of Bremen. Work is going on to integrate of satellite links with the Mbone and to test the MECCANO tools in this context.

    All sites use local distribution via Ethernet LANs; some also use unicast wide-area distribution via Basic Rate ISDN using a multicast/unicast gateway.

     

  3. On-line Project Meetings.
    4.

    In spite of the connectivity problems described above, most on-line project meetings were carried out in an acceptable way using the MECCANO video conferencing tools. Sometimes, however, for example on the 9th November, connectivity was close to zero – even RAT, using its redundant coding techniques, could not cope with the level of loss experienced. For a specific participant attending all meetings, the sound and video quality showed wide variations over the reporting period.

    Fig.2: VIC and RAT windows for MECCANO meeting, January 11th 1999.

     On some occasions, connectivity, network performance and participation were good enough to demonstrate the power of the MECCANO conferencing tools. One such occasion was the management meeting on 11th January 1999 when 19 people participated. Snap shots of the VIC and RAT windows, as seen at RUS, are shown below.

    As can be seen, Roy Bennett was speaking at the time the snapshot was taken; the other eighteen were listening. Not all of the participants are visible in the video window as viewed from RUS, but most of them were received at high quality.

    Only a small fraction of the problems experienced during the video conferencing sessions can be attributed to the MECCANO tool set, which can be characterized as stable. 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 encyption support to SDR. As mentioned earlier, work still remains to be done in order to achieve a more stable Mbone accross Europe.

     

  4. MECCANO seminars.
    5.

    Two seminars have been given from HP in Bristol. The first one demonstrated the use of slide presentation embedded in IP multicast videoconferencing during the official opening of the new facilities at HP Labs on 5th June 1998. The seminar went very well with good participation by the project partners and acceptable video and sound quality. The screen image seen from UCL is shown in Fig.3 below.

    Fig.3: Seminar from HP Labs, Bristol, 5th June 1998

    The second seminar from HP Labs was held on 7th October 1998, when Colin Krawchuck gave a presentation on user interaction in virtual environmentsentitled "Would you buy a used PC from this avatar?" [7]. This seminar used the same tools as the previous one from HP. A snap shot taken at UCL is shown in Fig.4 below.

    Fig.4: Seminar at HP Labs, 7th October 1998

    The last seminar in this reporting period entitled "Authoring on the Fly: A Method of Integrating (Tele-)Presentations and Multimedia Production" was held on 1st February 1999. It was organized by Jochen Lienhard from the University of Freiburg adnd was given by Wolfgang Hürst.

    The main objective of the seminar was to introduce and test the "Authoring on the Fly" (AOF) toolkit [8]. This toolkit includes a complete system for creating, transmitting, storing and reproducing multimedia content to be used in distributed presentations. The AOF whiteboard (AOFwb) was used in addition to the standard MECCANO audio and video tools. In addition to the presentation of prepared material, including high resolution graphics, AOFwb allows the lecturer to interactively edit text, point to objects and outline parts of the material (see Fig.5).

    Fig.5: Example showing the use of AOFwb

    The whole presentation may be recorded with the synchronization information and reproduced later. For this purpose a synchronization tool, AOFsync, is used (see Fig. 6). 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.

    Fig.6: AOFsync

    Only five partners were able to participate in the seminar due to connectivity problems experienced by many partners. Sound quality was good but the video was not received by all of the participating sites. AOFrec itself worked correctly.

     

  5. Demonstrations and presentations.

    6. A talk on "Secure Internet Multimedia Conferencing" and a demonstration of the MECCANO tools and the MECCANO security features for Internet conferencing took place at the ACM Multimedia 98 conference in Bristol, 14th-16th September 1998. There was considerable interest in this demo, even though security is difficult to demonstrate.

    At the IST Vienna conference, 30th November – 2nd December 1998, the use of MMCR through the CoBrow web interface was successfully demonstrated.

    Fig.7: Dr Jean Claude Lokietek

    Another demonstration of the MECCANO tools took place on 11th December 1998 at the Traumatology Clinic of the Collegium Medicum, Jagiellonian University at Wola Justowska, Krakow, Poland. MECCANO partner ACC prepared and performed the audio and video transmission of artroscopic shoulder surgery from the operating theatre to a conference room. This activity took place during the annual Polish-Belgian Ortopedy Seminar attended by some 30 people from Poland and 8 doctors from Belgium. The surgery was performed by Dr Jean Claude Lokietek from Belgium. The aim of the seminar was to present and discuss the artroscopic approach to shoulder surgery. During tests performed by ACC before the event, RAT and Vic were used on 133MHz Pentium PC it was demonstrated that the video quality of the stream generated by the PC was unacceptable. Therefore on the day a hardware MPEG-1 encoder was used producing very good quality video. During the seminar valuable feedback and experience was gathered and ACC has plans for similar activities in the future.

    Fig.8: Participants in the conference room at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow

    On Thursday, 25th February 1999, at the official launch of the TEN-155 service during the Essen conference to launch the Fifth Framework Programme, MECCANO demonstrated the benefit of a pan-European broadband network. The demonstration was made to Edelgard Bulmahn, the German Minister for Science and Education, and consisted of a multimedia conference between the exhibition hall in Essen and the MECCANO partner sites at UCL, INRIA and RUS. The demonstration, which included a presentation of the project, the MECCANO toolkit and future plans, was a great success. A snapshot from this demonstration is shown in Fig. 7 below. A comprehensive collection of snapshots from this event can be seen at the MECCANO website at RUS [9].

    Fig.9: Demonstration at the TEN-155 Official Launch, 25th February 1999.

     

  6. Summary.
    7.

    During the ten month period of this report, the European Mbone has suffered from overloading and connectivity problems as well as some incompatibilty between the national research networks. This inevitably has meant difficulties with the use of the MECCANO tools. These difficulties were not anticipated when the project started – nor was addressing them a priority goal of the project. For instance, the project plans to hold most of its project meetings over 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 held (with partners accepting a broad range of Mbone QoS) and the project has successfully delivered several seminars and demonstrated at a number of international conferences. Continuing efforts are being made to encurrage national and international network providers to upgrade their Mbone functionality. This is one reason why we volunteered for, and have participated in, the alpha testing of the VPN capabilities of TEN-155.

    The MECCANO Multimedia Conferencing Tools have been refined in several ways during the reporting period. These refinements include the addition of high quality sound to RAT, the inclusion of H.263 in VIC (on an experimental basis), improvements to NTE, inclusion of SIP in SDR and FreePhone and the release of new versions of the AOFwb/AOFrec presentation tools. These efforts have improved the functionality of the MECCANO multimedia tools and further work nements is in progress.

     

  7. Acknowledgements.

    8. 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)

    The authors would like to give special thanks to Peter Kirstein and Roy Bennett for their assistance in proof reading this document.

     

  8. References.

    9. [1] User Guides for some Mbone tools, UCL Sept. 1998. These are available for the following tools:
    SDR v2.5, VIC v2.8, RAT v3.0.23, NTE v1.5a23, WB v1.59 and WBD.

    [2] "Secure Conferencing User Guide", Edmund Whelan, UCL Sept. 1998

    [3] "Introduction to Multimedia Conferencing", UCL, Sept. 1998

    [4] Software and the User Guides in [1] – [3] above may be downloaded from:
    URL http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/

    Network monitoring results may be viewed at:
    URL http://www-ks.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/PROJ/MECCANO/

    TEN-155 web site is at:
    URL http://www.dante.net/ten-155.html

    [7] Supplementary info on HP seminar, 7th October 1998 is available from:
    URL http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/projects/meccano/seminars/

    [8] AoF Whiteboard is available from:
    URL http://ad.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/mmgroup.projects.meccano

    [9] Images from the launch of TEN-155 are available from:
    URL http://www-ks.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/PROJ/MECCANO/Snapshots/990225_TEN-155/