The Applications and Services team held the first training workshop last week at the University of Wollongong. Attendees came from The University of Ballarat, Curtin University, The University of Sydney, Charles Sturt University, Finders University, The University of Western Sydney, The University of New England, The University of Tasmania, The Australian National University, The University of Wollongong, CSIRO, University of Technology, Sydney, UNISA, USQ, Swinburne University, Wenona School, Pymble Ladies College, AIT Sydney, as well as The Catholic Education Network, Flinders Uni Rural Clinic School, and New South Wales Dept of Education.
Sponsors included LifeSize, Commerge, Sony, Cisco, Tandberg, Electroboard, Polycom, IPFocus and Scientific Acoustics.
Virtual worlds
The workshop included the following speakers: Mandy Salomon (Swinburne/SSCRC), Danny Stefanovic & Wes Ward (ExitReality), Professor Farzad Safaei (UoW/SSCRC), Scott Grant (Monash), Dr.Denise Wood (UNISA) and our coordinator and speaker Lindy McKeown (USQ).
Three virtual world platforms were shown live in SecondLife (via SL, Meerkat viewers), ExitReality, iSee platforms. Attendees were able to view the work of RMIT Art students via Lisa Dethridges (courtesy of Mandy), a talk from Danny via video via ExitReality, and Scott Grant’s use of SL for film production with students livein Beijing (Narrated by Lindy).
Denise concluded with a view ofher work in the accessibility space with her Developer Charles Mountain based in the USA. It was a truly international tour with local and remote audio and video management on the fly.
Further discussions with NSW Dept of Education identified opportunities for research and for AARNet to engage with NSW DET, SSCRC, Nortel and others on an NBN test bed infrastructure for virtual worlds.
Overall, it is clear that virtual worlds are in use to support teaching,learning and collaboration, the main barrier to its use lies in effective IT service support to access at low cost with reasonable network performance with storage options. There is a range of platforms available at high and low cost to deploy, operate, customise, maintain. Ideally a platform that can support multiple virtual world platforms with the ability to transfer the avatar, buildings and inventories is the way to go. CAPEX and software development is only part of the answer, marketing and engagement with real users is key to successful use of the technology.
Mandy Salomon has
blogged about the virtual worlds workshop
Tandberg TMS Training
Garvan Long from IP Focus provided an informative training session on the Tandberg Management System (TMS) with some good demonstrations of the lesser-known competencies of this management application.Topics that Garvan covered included handling password changes across both the application and controlled devices, IP and ISDN zone provisioning including the influence on resource selection and the management on local phone books and email templates. Garvan also delved into little used but highly sought afterfeature whereby endpoints behind a firewall may be remotely managed by utilising a ‘polling’ functionality.
Room Acoustics
Peter Patrick gave a very informative talk and demonstration about the basics of roomacoustics and how they might influence room based video conferencing.
He introduced the audience to the influencing factors in an acoustic environment before moving to the various types of microphones and demonstrated their acoustic properties. Peter then went on to describe acoustic influences and definitions used in the industry followed by a talk on how to treat those influences as well as facts and common myths about acoustics. Peter also described how various loudspeakers might be used and how to choose the correct type for the room at hand.
The fact that Peter not only gave a technical and informative talk but demonstrated the very sound properties he was describing gave the audience a much better understanding of the technical aspects of the talk by being able to hear and see the sound properties as Peter demonstrated them.
SIP Session
Lester Kum from Instra presented “ENUM & PhNUM”. He gave an introduction to ENUM and its benefits, the difference between User ENUM and Infrastructure (carrier) ENUM. Lester also reviewed existing implementations of ENUM and suggested that the key of failure of ENUM was its bypassing of calls on the PSTN which went against the business models that carriers have, this has led to little to no interest by them which is critical for ENUM to succeed on a large scale.
He concluded with PhNUM, a convergence technology using ENUM that enables users to purchase a Global Phone Number and redirect to anywhere in the world.
Adam Mulcahy from Cisco presented “SIP prospective industry and market”. He explained how SIP was developed from a service provider’s prospect, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and Telepresence. His experience provided speakers a lot of valuable information about SIP/SBC/IMS/TP.
Leon Li presented “Building SIP server with OpenSIPs”. This started with a basic concept of SIP, its elements and call flows. The session mainly focused on how to build SIP Registrar/Proxy/Location server with OpenSIPs (an open-source system based on Linux) by running commands step-by-step on a Debian based virtual machine. Due to the time limit, the building wasn’t completed, so the completed building procedures will be provided to all attendees as a follow up.
Attendees showed a lot of interests in SIP area and Adam’s topic is really attractive. Several technical staff have also tried to build SIP with OpenSIPs before but no success, thus, a detailed guide would be a definitely benefit.
Panel session
The panel session participation was extensive both from a vendor and attendee standpoint. Present were Patrick Micallef (Lifesize), Clint Palm (Tandberg), Adam Mulcahy (CISCO), Garvan Long (IPFocus),Troy Andrew (Polycom), Phil Rothwell (Sony), Peter Patrick (Scientific Acoustics) and Trent Sydney (Electroboard).
Questions from the audience were fast and furious with direct challenges from the workshop attendees on items such as how to know it’s time to change from one vendor to the other or embrace alternative technologies as well as how to calculate the worth of the manufacturer/wholesale/retail support model as it pertains to the educational and research market in Australia.
Also queried were the tactics vendors were using beyond merely promoting video conferencing as a green alternative, in terms of real carbon savings across the range of their products in an installed environment.
Photos from the day are available at
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/aarnet.pics/AARNetTrainingWorkshopUOW_Sept2009#