Current Status and Future Plans

Technical Progress

The collaboratory environment is composed of many components and tools that work together to provide information, control, and a sense of presence to the remote researcher. Progress on this project has been on several fronts.

Several groups are now using our remote camera control software to operate their camera systems remotely over the Internet. We have made significant improvements to the remote control software.
- The camera control server has been ported to a variety of platforms including Sun Solaris, SGI Irix, FreeBSD, and Windows 95/NT.
- We have greatly expanded the number of devices and degrees of freedom that our remote camera server can control.
- The server has been parallelized to speed up device handling and reduce response time.
- The server and client software have been modified to integrate the CIF communication library for its communication.
- The Akenti server software has been integrated to allow authorization of users who want to control the cameras.
- The server initialization procedure has been significantly enhanced to allow flexible user control over practically all of its configuration information and a simulation mode has been added to allow operation without cameras for testing purposes.
- A new version of the client (written in Java so it is cross-platform) has been released. This new version provides the user with the ability to launch the Java videoconferencing components to watch the camera output and to control the cameras by selecting on the video output window. The user can use this interface to select the location for the camera to point, which camera to view, the amount of zoom, and the location and size for the picture-in-picture.
- The specification of the camera command language has been published to allow users to build their own clients if they want to integrate control of a camera system into their existing software.
The Totem reliable multicast software was upgraded to allow very large messages to be sent by the electronic notebook . With the use of reliable multicast, the notebook is able to allow simultaneous editing of pages and each user gets all of the changes and the changes are consistent. With reliable ordered delivery, the users are assured that they see events in order regardless of where the events occurred; they only see the changes in the data value after they see the control values that caused the change.
The conference control tool, (confcntlr) has been ported to several Unix platforms and to Windows 95/NT. Because of difficulties with the vic/vat conference bus under Windows, the confcntlr is unable to control local versions of the tools but this does not hinder remote control from Windows. The confcntlr allows all aspects of the videoconferencing tools to be remotely activated and deactivated, without the user's needing to baby-sit the videoconferencing session or use the telephone to coordinate setup.
We have actively participated in the various committees and organizations that deal with distributed computing and collaborative technologies. One of the most important of these is the collaboratories architecture working group which is working to define a collaboratory architecture.
We have given several publicity talks and demonstrations, and we have worked with several projects at LBNL and at other laboratories to disseminate the collaboratory technology. These projects include the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array Project (AMANDA), the DeepIce project, the UC Davis video services group, and the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium.

Future Plans

We continue to make significant progress toward a complete collaboratory environment. In order to make the collaboratory environment a reality, several components require further work. In the coming year we plan to:

Integrate the user interfaces of the various tools in the collaboratory so that the user sees a single panel in order to access the tools. The conference controller provides a single videoconferencing interface. This theme needs to be expanded to other tools so that the user is not required to understand how to run each individual program in the environment.
Refine and integrate floor control mechanisms into the existing videoconferencing interfaces to allow for more natural sharing of control and feedback.
Develop versions of our videoconferencing control tools that are compatible with the UC Berkeley MASH toolkit.
Continue development of the remote camera control client. The current interface is functional but several enhancements are needed to improve its usability.
Improve our tools to incorporate features that are identified as needed during the prototype deployment. We will continue to improve ease of use, platform independence, and response time.

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