Videoconferencing and the web send Jupiter press conference worldwide

By Bill Steele

These days, "being there" is as easy as pushing a button. Especially if you have the right people hooking up the button for you.

When astronomers held a press conference at Cornell on Tuesday to announce new discoveries about the rings of Jupiter, some reporters went to Room 115 in the new Ives Classroom Building, and others gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. The two groups were linked by a two-way video/audio teleconference.

Still others watched the conference as live video, streamed over the World Wide Web. They were able to submit questions to the researchers at Cornell via e-mail funneled directly to a laptop on the presenters' table.

All this connectivity was made possible by the university's new Office of Distance Learning, which has been putting into place a variety of communications technologies for interactive long-distance teaching.

Room 115 is one of two classrooms specially equipped for distance learning with an assortment of wall screens, video projectors and electronic equipment for telephone and Internet connections. For the Jupiter press conference, a video link was established with JPL over three high-speed ISDN telephone lines. A screen at one side of the room displayed images of the scientists and media in Pasadena, and another, behind the speakers, showed images of Jupiter. A third screen at the back of the room switched from one view to another. Spectators in Pasadena saw the Cornell scientists and the images, and were able ask questions of the panel in Ithaca.

"You're right in the room with them," is how Jon Levy, director of the Cornell Office of Distance Learning, describes the effect. "You can see them, you can hear them, you can interact with them."

Meanwhile, thanks to the work of distance-learning specialists Amelia Ellsworth and Matt Willis, a mix of the video images was sent over the web, using a video-streaming program called NetShow 3.0, developed by Microsoft. Cornell is serving as a beta-test site for the software. Several dozen reporters, scientists and other interested viewers downloaded the NetShow client software prior to the conference. On their desktop computers they received live audio and video of the conference, with slides displayed in a separate frame on the web page as they were projected during the presentation in Ithaca. The video-streamed file has been stored on an Office of Distance Learning web server at http://www.odl.cornell.edu/jupiter/ and will be available to replay until further notice.

The NetShow technology has been in regular use for several months to make the Grand Rounds lecture series at the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell in New York City available to physicians on the web.

When not in use for press conferences and other special events, the ILR classrooms are home to several collaborative courses, including Animal Science 321, involving students and faculty members from Cornell, Penn State, SUNY at Cobleskill, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Vermont, and a Cornell Africana studies course shared with students at Syracuse University, SUNY at Binghamton and Morgan State College.

Meanwhile, Levy said, the university is deploying a variety of other distance-learning technologies, using video-conferencing, the Internet, satellite transmission, CD-ROMs and, yes, sometimes good old-fashioned paper.