As the pace of globalisation increases, project teams are becoming split between sites and countries. This leads to the stresses of travel and increases costs in terms of money, time, and impact on the environment. To help reduce these issues we have developed nuVa - a hands-on, user-centric Collaborative Work Environment (CWE) enabling split-site teams to work together more effectively. nuVa enables multi-party virtual meetings to be held securely and in real-time.
nuVa reduces travelling time, with considerable cost and environmental savings, and improves communications between team members. We are now providing nuVa as a service, in collaboration with cereno our managed network partner. Further information can be found in the nuVa brochure. The following sections outline the research that TRT (UK) is currently pursuing to develop new enhanced terminals and better connectivity so that users can enjoy the best possible collaboration experience at any time, wherever they are.
Human Machine Interfaces for natural collaboration
Users are looking to break free from the limitations of traditional pointing devices and keyboards to move to natural, pen, touch or gesture based input. They also want natural displays with content that can be rotated, resized and arranged naturally using the same techniques. We are investigating the use of the latest HMI techniques to evaluate how they fit with Virtual Collaboration systems.
Visual cues to collaboration
Many applications of synchronous Virtual Collaboration (where users have real-time audio/video and live shared applications) require the use of different terminal resources at different sites. For example a mobile field worker may only have a PDA or laptop, whereas an office based worker may have much larger communication and work spaces. In these asymmetrical conditions, both users can benefit from special visual cues beyond the standard communication and application content. We are researching the types of cue that work best in these conditions.
VISNET-II European Network of Excellence in Visual and Networked Media VC
TRT (UK) is a partner in the VISNET-II European Network of Excellence in Visual and Networked Media. This group of 12 European industrial and academic institutions has been working on leading edge research in video coding, audio-visual analysis, media network issues and security techniques. Ultimately this will provide seamless multimedia services across diverse networks. Further details can be found on the VISNET-II website.