[AG-TECH] Brainstorming From the Retreat

[Allan Kenneth Spale]

Greetings all,

I did not attend every minute of the proceedings last week, but I have to
say that it was inspiring to see how there is a lot of momentum behind the
Access Grid.

First thing was from the human factors retreat.  Rick Stevens gave a talk
about how the AG is good for group-to-group collaboration and may not
scale well for SC Global this fall.  I thought about that and he is right.
AG is good for group-to-group collaboration.  But, there are going to be
broadcast situations like the Chatauquas where people are going to use the
AG to sit in on this stuff.  So, I talked with one of the people from EVL
who attended with me (Kyoung Park) about her thoughts and study on this
matter.  Later I talked somewhat with Jonas Telandis of EVL about this.
He said that there is some work being done to distribute the Virtual
Venues setup so that people that want to run a venue could do so (at least
that was my understanding).  So it kind of made me think of my original
idea of getting VIC and RAT to be in some sort of "instant video" mode
(like instant messaging).  You could have "buddy lists" and such and keep
that group-to-group collaboration going.  This might be effective for
large presentations where maybe there are many venues where people could
choose to "sit" to hear and see a presentation.  There could be audio that
is only heard within the venue one is in and not the
broadcast/presentation venue.

Along these same lines, it would be nice if there could be a way to choose
a device that is a buffer.  As people who use VIC know, one you select a
device for video capture, it cannot be reused by any subsequent version of
VIC.  What if I wanted to be in multiple venues or had some convoluted
unicast vic session going (this is a case for EVL lately for a weekly
seminar) and could broadcast the same video to multiple IP addresses.  I
guess the same would be nice for RAT.

The other thing I thought about was this Voyager time-stamping and a need
for some sort of AG framework.  Now by no means am I knowledgeable about a
lot of AG stuff, but after hearing a lot of talks on the AG (adding
devices to the AG, running some programs on the AG, etc.), it seems that
what was talked about (maybe by Rick Stevens) in the welcoming talk (need
for some platform-independent OS for AG...unless I am convoluting talks),
seems like it should be more of an agenda item.  It just seems that the
more people do AG apps on their own, the less unified and interoperable
they will be.  At the very minimum, maybe some programming framework
could be created that utilizes a hierarchy that is based on some
superclass AG object (like Object in Java).  That way (at least in my
mindset), data can be passed around in some sort of unified format, or
objects could be persistent, shared, or run via some RPC somehow.

Just some things to think about or help people think of other things.  If
this stuff is already being worked on in some other regard by some people,
please disregard this posting.

But the AG proceedings were good for me in that they helped me see all of
the projects that are going on and helped me think about new things for
the AG.


Allan Spale
EVL / UIC node-op