Technical Highlights
As a result of our field trials which required several hundred hours of testing, we developed a "quality assurance" checklist to guide our events. Some highlights include:
- Excellent quality audio--preferably having the camera follow the speaker.
- Ability for instructor to see all the students' faces and their monitors.
- Consistent hardware and software on all workstations
Two technical problems continued to cause difficulty during our trials.
Stereo viewing : During our work with Michigan the workstations were set-up too close to one another. As a result one of the students wasn't seeing the stereo images in stereo. Without a good diagnostic tool, one has to rely on the system administrator's experience to set up the workstation properly. Even when set up appropriately, students complained that the flickering of the monitor gave them headaches and they couldn't look at the images for a prolonged period of time.
Multicast-set up delay: Remote Stereo Viewer requires multicast. If working properly once a session is initiated the protocol remains active. In the Michigan field trial, we repeatedly found the delay and the protocol to not function as intended. Although we escalated the problem to the vendors (Cisco and Juniper), the providers (CENIC, MERIT, and WiscNet), and Internet2 Working groups, we were unable to routinely run multicast sessions without experiencing significant delay (45 seconds or more). We found the regional network staff to be inexperienced with multicast and extremely slow to focus on the problem. As a result, we had to discontinue the field trial with Michigan.
Robert Cheng, the project's Technical Lead, discusses some of the network issues.