On Tuesday, people from around the nation met to mark the completion of a project by students from eight universities in four nations. Most of the students who collaborated for the effort never met each other in person.
In fact, many of the people at Tuesday's event were not even physically there.
Both the project and the meeting were achieved with the aid of online conferencing via the Internet2, a network of high-speed connections coordinated by 31 "gigaPoPs" ? ultrafast network access points ? around the country.
One of these gigaPoPs is Penn's own MAGPI, the staff of which played a facilitatory role in the student project.
Through their work over the past few months, teams of students at the eight schools, among them Drexel University, created a series of brief video clips to accompany "Descent to the Underworld," a short online game that places the Greco-Roman myth of Persephone's abduction by Hades, the lord of the underworld, in a modern context.
"Descent" ? designed by August Development Corp. of Warminster, Pa. ? is largely unremarkable it its gameplay. However, it is unusual in that it is a "game-film." Instead of accumulating wealth or points while navigating the first-person game, players are rewarded with clips of the films produced by the student teams.
At the game's conclusion, be it victory or death for the hero attempting to save his beloved, players can watch the assembled clips documenting their successes and failures along the way.
More striking than the game itself, however, is the growing
potential of high-speed communication over the Internet 2 that the project represents.
Nora Barry of Druid Media, Inc., the game-film's creator, noted several ways in which linking video over the Internet2 is superior to standard video-conferencing.
The technology permits the use of large-screen formats and presents multiple video links as separate windows on a computer desktop, meaning, that two people are able to converse while others can observe from their respective locations.
Greg Palmer, technical director of Internet2 and MAGPI for Penn's Information Systems and Computing, elaborated on the University's work on, and vision for, the Internet2 at the University.
The focus, he said, is on the collaboration between schools located anywhere in the world. For example, each of several schools could have a few students interested in taking a certain foreign language, but not enough to justify each forming a class. With the "virtual classroom" infrastructure provided by the Internet2, a professor at one school could teach a class comprising all the interested students.
Penn's Graduate School of Education, Palmer added, is a leader in making such possibilities a reality.
Meanwhile, however, the operation of the Internet2 at Penn "happens transparently to the individual user," Palmer said. E-mail sent between Internet2 users, for example, is automatically routed along the network with no apparent difference to the sender or the recipient.
The network finds its present niche among researchers, who use it to send large packets of data to their colleagues.
However, both Palmer and Barry are looking to the future of the Internet2 as a valuable collaborative tool. Both hope to begin work on another project similar to the game-film, hopefully involving more students at more schools.
Palmer added that, in addition to MAGPI, Penn students would likely take part in a future project.
While the larger-scale project is just an idea at this point ? Palmer has yet to secure funding for it ? he thinks the future for Internet2 collaboration is bright.
