[AG-TECH] Sharing Handwritten Presentation Slides on AG ?

[Jay Beavers]

Thanks Ivan.

I'd be interested in talking details about some infrastructure work that
would allow Classroom Presenter (and our ConferenceApi) to derive the
venue settings from an AG 2.1 environment.

The biggest usability problem we had with Classroom Presenter 1.0 in the
context of using it within venues was that it didn't inherit the
existing venue context from the already running environment (in our case
the venue that was already entered by our BarUI) and users rapidly got
confused about how to cojoin presentations and a/v and other
capabilities in the same venue.  I imagine we'd repeat the experience
with AG and I know you've done a lot of architecture work to overcome
this usability limitation.

As part of ConferenceApi, we have an easy way to tell CXP apps to join a
dynamic venue (AKA a venue initialized on the client from an already
known IP/Port, name, etc.), so if we could figure out a way for the AG
2.1 client to initialize the Conference Api with these values, then we
could launch Classroom Presenter 'into' an AG 2.1 venue.

The proposed method I would do this would be to use a command line
utility that takes the IP/Port as parameters.  That way you could invoke
it via a Perl or TCL or whatever environment is best suited to you.
We'd use the same IP, but slightly different ports (say Port+2 for RTP
and Port+3 for RTCP) since there are some compatibility problems with
our RTCP implementation and VIC's RTCP implementation that Colin pointed
out but we haven't fixed yet and we're going to be using different
parity error correction and encryption (Rijndael) for our RTP packet
payloads.

We can provide you the command line utilities and if you provide the
invoke method, this should be an easy way to implement a user friendly
story.  We can either provide different command line utilities for
"send" vs. "receive", or we could make these command line parameters.

A side benefit of this is you could also invoke any other ConferenceXP
capability the same fashion.  For instance, we have a 3D shared model
viewer under development, our A/V using Windows Media compression, and
we're working on simple but high quality multicast app sharing over Rtp
as well.

My proposal would look like:

ConferenceXPInvoke.exe IPAddress:Port CapabilityNameToSend ...
CapabilityNameToSend

For example:

To start sending ClassroomPresenter and listen for incoming ConferenceXP
streams:
ConferenceXPInvoke 234.5.6.7:5004 ClassroomPresenter

To start sending ClassroomPresenter plus Windows Media Video and listen
for incoming streams:
ConferenceXPInvoke 234.5.6.7:5004 ClassroomPresenter WMVideo

To just listen for incoming streams:
ConferenceXPInvoke 234.5.6.7:5004

In each case, we'd listen/send Rtp on 234.5.6.7:5006 and Rtcp on
234.5.6.7:5007.

If you want me to throw in a bonus, I could make sure that we punch a
hole in the Windows XP firewall not only for UDP/5006 & UDP/5007 but
also UDP/5004 and UDP/5005.  That way AG would get Windows XP Internet
Connection Firewall support :-)

We may also want parameters to turn on/off our AutoPlay behavior as well
as window autoposition position behavior.  I'm working on a sample
command line app right now that implements custom window placement and
this might be another area that you guys might be able to make AG/CXP
integration friendlier, though it would take some thought as to how you
would pass "only show windows here" information via the command line.
Perhaps a rectangle bounding box of "only use this display space"?


One aspect not covered in this proposal is passing user information to
fill out the standard RTCP properties for a session, like CNAME, NAME,
PHONE, LOCATION, etc.  Right now we derive this information from a venue
service lookup from email address that comes either from the Windows NT
logon credentials or Passport credentials used with Windows Messenger.
Perhaps as a v2 integration encore we could gather this contextual
information from the AG session as well.


Oh, and if you want to propose an AGInvoke.exe application that took
IP/Port as parameters, I'm sure we could create a ConferenceXP
Capability that launched that.  That way we could start to get two-way
compatibility working via a simple invoke workflow.  This is something
we discussed briefly at the last ConferenceXP Developers Conference, but
neither of us found the spare time to follow up upon unfortunately.

 - jcb

-----Original Message-----
From: Ivan R. Judson [mailto:judson at mcs.anl.gov] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 7:35 PM
To: Jay Beavers; 'Stuart Levy'; 'daagarwal'
Cc: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: RE: [AG-TECH] Sharing Handwritten Presentation Slides on AG ?


I have to chime in here, we've been looking at solutions and the german
whiteboard software looks pretty cool; but Conference XP Presenter is
even
nicer. It's thought about the actual presenting problem in the context
of
collaboration, the german software combines the collaboration
infrastructure
(chat, presence, etc) into the same tool, which I find annoying :-)

Just a thought.

--Ivan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov 
> [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of Jay Beavers
> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 3:07 PM
> To: Stuart Levy; daagarwal
> Cc: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
> Subject: RE: [AG-TECH] Sharing Handwritten Presentation Slides on AG ?
> 
> 
> ConferenceXP has a shared powerpoint/whiteboard tool called 
> "Classroom Presenter" that sends data over Rtp and is built 
> on top of the Tablet PC.
> 
> It also captures the ink using the Tablet PC SDK, so you get 
> high quality oversampled ink strokes with smoothing, colors, 
> widths, transparency and such.  This application was written 
> by Richard Anderson and team from University of Washington on 
> top of the Conference Api and Rtp Api that is part of ConferenceXP.
> 
> See http://www.ConferenceXP.Net for details and download 
> links to binaries and source code.
> 
>  - jcb
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov 
> [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf > Of Stuart Levy
> 
> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 12:48 PM
> To: daagarwal
> Cc: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
> Subject: Re: [AG-TECH] Sharing Handwritten Presentation Slides on AG ?
> 
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 12:25:57PM -0700, daagarwal wrote:
> > Cindy,
> > have yon considered having your instructor use a tablet PC for real 
> > time handwritten notes and equations?  I am experimenting with one 
> > now. It seems good for on-the-fly handwritten equations and notes.
> > Deb
> 
> Coolio.  Some people here were thinking to try one.  I'm 
> hoping to use the mbone whiteboard tool (wbd) with it -- 
> though as someone here pointed out recently, wbd doesn't use 
> RTP, so I guess we can't use Voyager to record it, too bad. 
> Do you use that, or what?
> 
>     Stuart
> 
>