UB Group Brings High-Quality Videoconferencing And Streaming Video To The Desktop

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- How long will it be before you can participate in a videoconference or "visit" with an overseas client without leaving your desk? If a recent experiment at the University at Buffalo is any indication, it could be much sooner than many people think.

"It worked beautifully," said Nancy Campbell-Heider, Ph.D., UB nursing professor, of the demonstration in which UB staff brought high-quality videoconferencing and streaming video to the desktop over the Internet.

The success has major implications for health-care delivery in remote areas and for distance learning, especially within the next few years when Internet2, with its huge bandwidth capacity, is up and running.

The purpose of the experiment was practical: UB nursing faculty wanted to tap into and broadcast an evaluation of a student working with a patient in a clinical setting for a conference presentation in California about the use of videoconferencing to remotely evaluate students. But the usual videoconferencing linkup using telephone lines was not available at the conference site.

So UB information-technology staff decided to use the Internet, an extremely attractive -- if technically challenging -- option. The interactive session was transmitted to desktop viewers at UB and throughout the clinical site at Erie County Medical Center (ECMC) over an Internet conference "bridge" at Ohio State University.

Currently, videoconferencing takes place over ISDN (integrated services digital network) lines, which are installed individually and incur charges as telephone calls do. But with the Internet, anyone with a desktop PC and Internet access is suddenly a potential audience member.

The experiment taxed the resources of UB staff and faculty. Right up until airtime, UB staff members were working to fix technical glitches. Peter Jorgensen, UB senior programmer analyst, literally was slicing into cables with a knife to remedy a problem that was interfering with video transmission. In the meantime, James Whitlock, UB associate director of computing services who was coordinating controls from Maine, where he was on vacation, was making plans to fly equipment to Buffalo, if necessary. Luckily, with four minutes left until scheduled airtime, Jorgensen found and fixed the problem.

At the same time, Zydacron, Inc.; Cisco Systems, Inc., and RADvision and Viewcom, the companies responsible for developing the technologies that eventually will make desktop videoconferencing and streaming video ubiquitous, provided the UB group with major donations of equipment and staff assistance.

According to Whitlock, UB, ECMC, Ohio State and the companies all saw the value of making this demonstration work.

"We needed to do this," said Whitlock, who, along with UB IT staff members and their counterparts from the UB nursing and medical schools and ECMC, spent the two weeks leading up to the experiment working on the project nearly round-the-clock.

"People need to see these things in order to understand what they are," said Whitlock. "It's very visceral. What we managed to do was give people a glimpse of the horizon, which is coming at them very rapidly. It may be five years before we can do this with relative ease, but that's very rapid in comparison to how long it will take people and institutions to adapt to it."