Philippe Galvez
Research Scientific Manager
VRVS Project Manager
California Institute of Technology
1200 East California Blvd.
M/C 256-48
Pasadena, CA 91125
The Virtual Room Videoconferencing System (VRVS) provides a low cost, bandwidth-efficient, extensible means of videoconferencing and remote collaboration over networks within the High Energy and Nuclear Physics communities. Since it went into production service in early 1997, deployment of the Web-based system has expanded to include 7800 registered hosts running the VRVS software in 59 countries. A set of 37 "reflectors" interconnected using unicast tunnels and multicast manage the traffic flow at HENP labs and universities in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America.
VRVS provides the versatile collaboration tools, MBone(vic/rat), H.323(Polycom, Netmeeting), Quicktime, Desktop/Application sharing, Chat on various platform for fully cooperation. Recent and ongoing developments include support for MPEG2 videoconferencing, shared collaborative environments, QoS over networks, etc. Our goal is to support a set of new and essential requirements for rapid data exchange, and a high level of interactivity in large-scale scientific collaborations.
