Multimedia Delivery Systems (D3)
Project PI: Harrick Vin
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
The Multimedia Delivery systems project will create a digital information delivery system based on Intel client-server architecture and Windows NT and will experiment with novel methods for organizing and delivering multimedia content in a testbed application. Today, most education is based on textual material, however, video and audio are often more effective in communicating information. Consequently, to enhance the effectiveness of delivering education to increasingly distributed audiences, this project will: (1) create a repository of digital modules containing video lectures, notes, presentation slides, simulation packages, animation, images, and exercises; and (2) provide efficient methods for organizing and browsing through this information space.
Each module will consist of digitized video lectures, notes of the topic, examples of using the data structures (possibly through animation), and some exercises. These modules will be linked together using a hyper-text mark-up language (such as html), which will enable the students to navigate through the course material as well as study each topic at their desired level of detail.
Access to all of the course material will be provided to students through a Web-like interface customized for Windows NT. This interface will have video and graphics as its primary window, and a text window subsidiary to that, rather than the reverse situation that exists today. The video window is to be used for the primary presentation of information, much as is done on educational television now, complete with an audio track providing an explanation. This audio track can be echoed as a moving transcript in the text window when it is open, which also provides the opportunity for allowing the provision of hyper-links in text format as is currently done in html. Thus, the text window is as much an input window as an output window, through which the student interacts with the presentation.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
These projects involve the design and implementation of: (1) a multimedia file system and a scaleable Web server for efficient storage and retrieval of large hyper-media objects; (2) network algorithms and protocols for transmission of hyper-media documents over the Internet; and (3) operating system mechanisms for efficient processing and streaming of data at the end-station.
IMPACT
The results of this project will have a significant impact on development of large-scale digital libraries and distance learning tools that are likely to form the basis of education in the near future. Moreover, results of this testbed application will trigger the development of similar multimedia delivery systems using Intel platforms for widely distributed and complex information needs in health-care, manufacturing systems, and commercial domains.
EQUIPMENT
This project requires 3 quad process servers, 15 dual processor client machines and 4 desktop systems.
RESOURCES
Faculty and students associated with the Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory in Computer Sciences work on multiple research projects tied to various aspects of high-performance networked multimedia systems. Two major research projects currently underway in the Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory are: (1) design and implementation of a multimedia storage server and (2) development of network and transport protocols for digital audio and video.
BENEFITS TO INTEL
Multimedia, especially in terms of digital libraries, promises to be one of the most challenging and lucrative applications for client-server computing. This project will provide significant performance tests of Intel and Windows NT in this emerging data intensive application.
RELATED WEB SITES
Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory URL: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dmcl