InfoVISION: Interactive Information, Video, Imagery and Simulation on Demand

SUMMARY

This InfoMall program is a linked set of projects developing prototype dual-use information applications and associated technologies for military, consumer, education and business use.

PARTICIPANTS

NPAC
Rome Laboratory
Abrams/Gentile Entertainment
NYNEX
Oracle
Kodak
Syracuse University (ECE, Education, Information Studies, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs)

KEY CONTACTS

Geoffrey C. Fox, gcf@npac.syr.edu, (315) 443-1722

IMPACT

This area has been identified as one of the most promising areas for early deployment of HPCC technologies.

DESCRIPTION

Current activity in the Telecommunication, cable and entertainment industry will establish the key infrastructure which will eventually link essenti ally all homes and institutions to large high performance information servers. The video on demand application will drive the infrastructure and ensure that reasonable compressed video can be broadly delivered. INFOVISION aims to develop prototypes of novel services which are enabled by this infrastructure. This program is conducted through InfoMall by a set of collaborations between the partners with most of the projects still at a planning or early implementation phase.

Work includes:

• Virtual Reality edutainment products scalable from game cartridge, to CDROMS and to large databases on the IVS servers. These products are based on large scale HPCC simulations and three dimensional terrain rendering. The latter use Landsat and higher resolution imagery.
• Image databases on demand based on KodakÕs Photo-CD technology.
• Parallel Oracle for video databases frontended by scripts (also in the database) allowing commercial and institutional video segments to be randomly searched. Initial projects are directed at the education market and also to support the United Nations.
• Full text searches of information coupled to experimental education databases. One prototype is based on the askERIC educational resource established at Syracuse University. Another involves a collaboration between Maxwell and the United Nations for policy decisions involving newspaper databases.