by Guenther Schulze Institute for Telecooperation Technology GMD - TKT Rheinstr. 75 D-64295 Darmstadt
MICE (Multimedia Integrated Conferencing for European Researchers) is a project funded by the EU. It was started with the goal to pilot multimedia conferencing between European researchers, and connecting them to sites in the US. A key factor was that scientists should be able to use their regular workstations and networks (internet in particular) for this purpose. Multiway connections between six European countries and the US have been successfully tested and used for multimedia conferences with audio, video and shared workspace data. The technology developed has been used in regular weekly project meetings and in international seminar series on topics from multimedia and CSCW technologies. It has been demonstrated successfully in public events at the JENC, IETF, and INTEROP conferences. At present, the MICE-WWW-Server at UCL (http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/mice.html) offers only some static background information like abstracts on seminar talks or dates of future events. However, current conferences are not visible over the WWW, and access to a conference via WWW is not (yet) realized by MICE. Our demonstration will show that access to MICE conferences through WWW is technically feasable. It will bring the conference overview into a WWW-page and even allow the WWW-reader to select conferencing tools in order to participate in this conference. For actively participating in conferences the MICE technology needs workstations equipped with camera, video board, microphone, speaker and conferencing software. The used software includes (among other tools)
The goal of this demonstration is to integrate MICE conferences into the WWW environment. The basic idea is to map the existing conference directory on a WWW-page of a conference server. A click on a conference button of this WWW-page would provide more information of the selected conference. Another click on a certain button of the conference page would eventually start the necessary server and client tools which initiate the MICE communication between the running conference and its new participant.
Any WWW-reader will be able to get the conference information. However, in order to become an active participant of a conference, a WWW-reader must have the MICE conference tools installed on his/her local workstation. The conference participation itself will happen by ordinary MICE communication outside of the WWW environment. Authorization for participation will be the first step of the MICE communication also outside of the WWW environment. WWW just offers conference information and the step to join into a conference.
A technical solution can be sketched like this: The existing information tool of MICE runs on the WWW-server side as a background process and fills the respective WWW-page regularly with the most current information. Every conference will be presented as an extra hyperlink and can be clicked for conference-specific information. A conference-specific WWW-page contains an extra open-link button. Clicking this button would initiate the server to send a parameter set to the client, which allows the client to start his/her MICE-tools for this conference appropriately. The parameter set is recognized by a MICE-specific name-suffix which is recogized on the client-side and then locally mapped on a client-process to start the necessary MICE tools. (For the time being, the ".csh"-suffixing will have to be used, which, on the client side, will not initiate a general c-shell, but only a MICE-specific interpreter in order to protect the client against malicious programs from the server. In the long run, however, this application needs support of general name-suffixes by the HTML/HTTP procedure, as is already discussed on the related discussion lists.)
Our demonstration will show that access to MICE conferences through WWW is technically feasable. It will bring the conference overview into a WWW-page and even allow to select conferencing tools in order to participate in these conferences. WWW readers will be able to get all information about a currently active conference. Clicking the right buttons of the respective WWW-page will equip the reader with local audio, video, and white-board processes that will make the reader a full participant of the conference.
The poster presented at our demonstration clearly explains the focal points of this WWW application and its technical background.