TCFI
UCSB Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology      CalTrans Testbed Center for Interoperability         


Fall, 2000 ATON/UCSB Quarterly Report

Introduction

In the last few months, the CREATE ATON team has grown in size, and has extended their activities in all of the ATON task domnains. This update is relative to the June, 2000 ATON/CREATE mid-term report and associated references that are available at http://www.create.ucsb.edu/ATON.

Milestones and Deliverables

We delivered a reasonable (even impressive) "mid-term" report for a project that had hardly started at the time. The references are available at http://www.create.ucsb.edu/ATON. On July 24th, Alex and Frode managed a tour and demo for visiting CalTrans dignitaries, showing the CREATE lab infrastructure and hearing from our colleagues at UCSD about their progress. Between June and October, each of the teams produced important deliverables. The VR team has an implemented VRML model of a large part of the UCSD campus, and has prepared several "virtual fly-throughs" using the DRIVE VR delivery framework.

The ATON Team and Infrastructure

We have a team of 12 researchers, managers, administrators working today at CREATE on ATON. We were able to fill our open positions with high-caliber researchers, but also lost our project administrator.

ATON Staffing Q3/00

The ATON lab in South hall is set up, and we look forward to having access to more space in the near future. We have also set up the LLCH sound booth as an office/lab for Frode and Andreas; it is equipped with 1 Sun/Windows dual-processor machine and an X terminal at present. The current UNIX network consists of 2 Sun Ultra10s (with Pentium coprocessors running Windows NT) (jerk and belly)), 1 Sun Ultra1 (volta), 2 dual-processor SGI Octanes (safety and twist), and an X Terminal (slow); this is augmented by 1 or more Macintosh (stomp, nomad) and/or PC (waltz, polka) computers. The network switching is based on an HP ProCurve GigabitEthernet/100BaseT switch, which is to be connected to the 2nd-round UCSB GigaBit backbone fiber in Q4/00. As part of the VRIO task, we have purchased a variety of I/O devices including a Kaiser Electro-Optics ProView 60 stereo-optic head-mounted "helmet" display, Fifth Dimension Technologies Data Glove 5, and two Ascension Flock of Birds motion trackers.

UCSD Relationship

We have had regular meetings among the management team and research assistants associated with the ATON teams at UCSB and UCSB. The collaboration is helped by the fact that Prof. Trivedi comes to UCSB regularly for DiMI executive committee meetings. We had several very productive planning meetings in the process of preparing the mid-term report.

TCFI Relationship

The UCSB team arranged the above-mentioned demo for visiting CalTrans dignitaries, and also held our official "kick-off" meeting with the combined staff of ATON and TCFI.

HPDM Task

We have re-deployed the CORBA infrastructure from the IDOT project, and augmented it with new platforms and ORBs; we're currently developing using the following CORBA software: We also have an obsolete (1997, CORBA 2.0) version of Iona Orbix for Windows NT.

Frode Holm and Stephen Pope have been running the IDOT tests on the new ORBs, and extending the test suite to use additional CORBA services such as the naming, trading, and event channel services. We are also designing an extended CORBA IDL (ExIDL) and preparing to build preprocessors and extended compilers for use with the TAO ORB. We have also designed a prototype distributed sound mixer (named SNDLab) as a test application for working with streaming multimedia using the CORBA A/V Streams interface and TAO ORB.

Wireless Network Task

On the basis of suggestions from TCFI, we looked into the currently available wireless standards such as BlueTooth and AirPort. CREATE researcher Anibal Intini produced an excellent survey comparing the features of the current generation of systems. TCFI now wants to move onto the next generation of systems, which are not generally available yet. Anibal Intini is in the process of developing MATLab simulations of several components of the new IEEE 802.11a standard, and hope to have a complete simulation finished in Q4 2000. His report on the standard is available on the ATON web site.

World-building Task

Even though it is outside of the original project plan, we invested almost a full a staff year of effort in building a detailed and true 3D virtual model of a section of the UCSD campus. This VRML world is intended for use with a virtual reality rendering system together with the live data fed from the robots our partners at UCSD are implementing. The three deliverables from this task include a detailed report comparing a wide range of software tools for 3D modeling, a Web page with numerous figures and two QuickTime movies describing the task, and the VRML code and support files.

VR I/O Task

We have worked with the DIVE VR system in all of our previous projects with TCFI, and it remains our primary VR tool. We have just started a formal task of evaluating VR delivery packages, including DIVE, EonReality, Multigen/Vega, VRJuggler, VRUT, and others. We are comparing these packages in terms of their features, performance, cost, portability, and programmability.

We have also recently started the design and implementation of a stand-alone sound spatializer based on the earlier (1992) DIVE "aural perspective engine."

Project Status and Plans

The CREATE team is making good progress on ATON. We have a number of remaining challenges (i.e., space), but are thankfully spending most of our effort on the tasks at hand.

By the end of 2000, we intend to have the CORBA distributed processing framework up and running with extended CORBA services including trading service. We will test this using our own multimedia applications over several kinds of LAN, MAN, and WAN. The DRIVE VR system will be working on our network supporting distributed multi-user complex worlds with varying modes of I/O. We will also have a first version of a stand-alone controllable sound spatializer for HPDM and DRIVE.

For more information, see http://www.create.ucsd.edu/ATON or contact Stephen T. Pope. 



URL = http://www.create.ucsb.edu/aton/0010/Q3.00.report.html
Created: 2000.10.12; LastEditDate: 2000.10.25