SoftMedia has been integrated into Softlab, and provides a multi-media
platform for collaboration between the physical and virtual laboratories. This
allows users of Softlab to look at and monitor the physical laboratory via
video conferencing while running a remote experiment using SoftLab's virtual
laboratory. Scientists using the virtual environment can also communicate
with experimental scientists in the actual lab using audio conferencing and
whiteboard facilities.
An essential component of SoftLab is the availability of multimedia
functions. The physical and virtual laboratories are separated from each other
(perhaps by many miles), and scientists using the virtual laboratory
environment may need to see what is happening in the physical lab. They may
also need to communicate with scientists and technicians who are in the lab,
and this communication may require video, audio or transmissions of diagrams
and computations.
SoftMedia is a general framework for integrating multimedia conferencing tools
to any problem solving environment requiring multimedia facilities. An
instance of SoftMedia is a collaborative platform which supports audio
conferencing, video conferencing, and whiteboard capabilities.
SoftMedia supports dynamic re-configurability, so that a single interface
can be presented to the user across machines with varying low-level audio and
video software. These off-the-shelf multi-media tools are used to configure
SoftMedia properly, according to the communication requirements of the PSE.
For further information contact softlab@cs.purdue.edu
SoftMedia