Megaconference 2007 was held on November 8-9 and hosted in Australia by
AARNet who provided bridging ports across the standard and high definition
Codian Multipoint Control Units (MCUs).
This event, running 12 hours from midnight Thursday until
midday Friday, attracted significant international participation from
approximately 400 endpoints distributed across the globe. MCUs from several
vendors, with ports donated by other NRENs and institutions, were cascaded
together to form a large scale voice-switched video conference.
The theme of this years conference revolved around
presentations that related to large-scale social issues with participants from Pakistan, Myanmar,
India and the Ukraine.
The Australian contribution from Australian Catholic
University on Indigenous
Education Programs was well received and contributed to the overall theme of
global cooperation.
AARNet were concurrently testing a Polycom HDX high
definition conferencing endpoint in conjunction with remote parties who were
using endpoints from the major video conferencing vendors. This allowed an in
depth understanding to be gained on the principles of operation of large scale
conferences involving disparate vendor equipment and was gauged a success by
all involved.
Images from Megaconference 9:
The
Internet2 Commons Streaming Server (page 5) hosts the archived conference proceedings.
Interestingly, I came across a link to Digital Art from Megaconference 5 where less than stellar network and codec performance caused some interesting H.323 'artwork'. We've certainly come a long way since those days, however the experimentation with Polycom's 'People on Content' feature (greenscreen) did yield some interesting effects for the participants.