Rich Media Engine for Collaborative Workspaces

Sorceron proposes a novel server-client system that delivers a virtual collaborative environment to outreach and telescience participants of NASA?s Earth Science Enterprise. Rich media including live and archived natural and synthetic video, audio, 3-D models, telemetry, and data are (1) collected from sources including ESE data centers and the participants themselves, (2) objectized and integrated into MPEG-4, MPEG-7, and MPEG-21 compliant streams, (3) securely conveyed to participants and audiences with diverse computing platforms (from workstations to wireless PDAs), and (4) rendered at the client in a participant-driven interactive fashion that supports user-directed real-time scientific visualization, manipulation of viewpoints and articulation of models, scientific exploration, enhanced learning, real-time analysis of experiment data, and real-time experiment control (if authorized) without the need of special hardware. The Sorceron client admits future media types and includes interfaces through which a user can connect additional software to the content stream, including Matlab/Simulink workspaces and experiment-specific control GUIs. A graphical authoring tool facilitates the set-up of collaborative environments, telescience and outreach sessions. Individual content streams are applied advanced compression/decompression and transport protocol optimized to the instantaneous available processing, multimedia, and communications capabilities of the client platform so as to enhance session quality and scalability.