[AG-TECH] Is the Lobby active or inactive?

[Christoph Willing]

On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 05:10, Randy Groves wrote:
> With the advent of the new venue server and clients, I'm wondering what the 
> function of the 'Lobby' should be - if, in fact, it needs to exist - at 
> least as a place where audio and video are active.  Until such time as the 
> network services exist to throttle the communications, entering the venue 
> could be problematic if you are using a low-bandwidth client, and you are 
> suddenly bombarded with the streams from all the people who are 'parked' in 
> the lobby.
> 
> Though it hasn't undergone real extensive testing (and probably won't now 
> that 2.0 is out and looking good), my 1.x venue server doesn't have ANY 
> streams in the lobby.  This gives folks a way to 'stop and catch their 
> breath' before plunging into the fray.
> 
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on this.  Of course, since it isn't 
> presently possible to configure a room with NO streams allocated, the point 
> is somewhat moot.  But that's how I see us using the lobby.
> 


We've found a lot of good use for the ANL Lobby with lots of nodes
parked there. After we built our first node and were trying to convince
others (builders and funders) to do likewise, it was good to be able to
log into a single room and show people a large sample of existing users.

The prospect of collaborating with researchers all over the world was
immediately demonstrated by seeing so many video streams from the
Americas and Europe. Of course the timezone difference meant many of
those video streams were just black, since it was night over there
during our daylight hours. Way back then, there were no other nodes in
this timezone so we couldn't really ask nodes elswhere to be active for
quick demos during their night time.

Even though there are now many nodes in this region, the ANL Lobby is
still handy for demonstrating the world wide scale of the AG. Its a bit
of a shame that fewer nodes are parked there these days.

chris


-- 
Chris Willing                      Telephone   (61-2) 9351 3914
VisLab, A28                        Facsimile   (61-2) 9351 7726
University of Sydney
NSW 2006 Australia                http://www.vislab.usyd.edu.au