Postgraduate students and staff at the NOVARS Research Centre, University of Manchester were linked virtually with colleagues and students in Sheffield and Leicester Universities via Manchester's Access Grid.
The Access Grid may be thought of as a prototype for "next generation video conferencing". The aim of the inventors of Access Grid (at the Futures Lab, Argonne National Laboratory) was to implement a technology that could support productive meetings between remote participants that are as effective as face-to-face meetings - all using commodity hardware. This can only happen if one is able to forget the technology and concentrate on the meeting itself.
Features of the Access Grid are:
- Very high quality audio
- Big display to enable full-size people shots and simultaneous viewing of all remote sites
- Multiple cameras to show groups and multiple viewpoints
- Collaborative software to enable remote participants to share and interact with data
- Usage of IP multicast, to enable bandwidth-efficient networking
For more information about the Access Grid, visit this link
