BEING PREPARED

When a crisis erupts -- an epidemic, a blackout, a hurricane -- access to information is absolutely critical. Emergency responders need to know that the information they need is always available in the same location. They need to know what their collaborators are doing. And they need constantly to be available to one another -- the time wasted in locating someone in another part of the building can mean the difference between life and death.

For such emergencies, "situation rooms," special rooms in government and municipal facilities are often equipped with state-of-the-art technology. Wireless laptop connections have become commonplace, as has videoconferencing. In 2003, for example, the Access Grid, developed at Argonne National Laboratory, was used to connect doctors and researchers around China, Hong Kong, and the globe to respond to the SARS outbreak. "Situation rooms" are also often a feature of business headquarters and universities, where intensive planning and problem solving before a major software release or project launch may require all participants to be close at hand for long periods of time.

However, collaborations are increasingly becoming more and more geographically dispersed, with participants located hundreds or even thousands of miles apart -- sometimes, as in the case of the SARS response, even separated by an ocean. Furthermore, they may need access not only to state-of-the-art communication technologies, but visualization, computational simulation, and data mining technologies as well.

The Continuum consists of a number of networked modules that can be operated together as an enormous "desktop." view larger

A collaboration between TRECC and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) is giving scientists, developers, and corporate partners a glimpse into the future of both long-distance collaboration and crisis planning. The result of this collaboration is the Continuum -- one of a series of networked project rooms or "situation rooms" equipped with state-of-the-art communication technologies and advanced computational research and visualization tools -- which facilitates research projects or crisis management over large distances as easily as if the participants were sitting around the same table.

"The Continuum is the result of our thinking about how people will work together in the future," says Jason Leigh, a researcher at EVL who is a principal developer of the Continuum. "When all these technologies become inexpensively available, how will that change the way people work? How will that change the medical profession, or homeland security?"

Rethinking the "situation room"

With the Continuum, EVL and TRECC have taken the concept of the "situation room" much further. The Continuum is an example of what is known as an Amplified Collaborative Environment (ACE), a collaboration space that is more than a single "situation room" -- it's a network of situation rooms, like the nodes of a cluster. However, these nodes may span a considerable geographical distance, enabling collaborators at many different locations to work together considerably more effectively using advanced computational tools and applications.

A typical Continuum consists of a modular framework based on a cluster of eight networked PCs, which support a variety of collaboration technologies. One important element is a conferencing module, which allows collaborators to communicate via Polycom or Access Grid videoconferencing technology.

Jason Leigh of EVL demonstrates the 3-D capabilities of the scalable display module. view larger

However, the Continuum goes beyond mere face-to-face communication. "Let's say you're an auto manufacturer," says Jason Leigh. "You can use the Access Grid to talk to the person on the other end, but you can also say, hey, let me show you the latest design of the car. And they'd be able to bring it up on their end and let it float in three-dimensional space." This second module, called the immersion module, is a passive stereo virtual reality display for visualizing three-dimensional data sets, specifically, a GeoWall (called the GeoWall because of its wide use in the Geoscience community).

Thirdly, the scalable display module, is a high-resolution display composed of tiling four LCD screens in a 2x2 array. "The idea behind a scalable tiled display is that you can show a large amount of content at once, and you can make the displays as large as you need it" explains Leigh. In the future, he says, when these display technologies become cheaper, it will be possible to wallpaper an entire room with screens.

"Let's say you're trying to fight land fires," says Leigh. "You could have a very high-resolution digital map on your wall, and on top of that you could overlay real-time simulation of where that fire is spreading, and you would overlay real-time satellite imagery on top of that to correlate it against the real situation. You need a tiled display with lots of resolution to handle this kind of information."

Another module, the Annotation Module, replaces the conventional project room's white board and flip-tablet with a plasma screen enhanced with a Matisse Smartboard on which collaborators can "write" using a stylus. "If people are working together over long distances," says Leigh, "they're going to need a whiteboard to scribble down thoughts, and the whiteboard needs to be shared between sites. So that's why we added a touch screen to the Continuum. Ideally, in the future you could write over your digital wallpaper too." The Annotation Module and all the others are accessible by the Wireless Interaction Module, which allows collaborators to control the Continuum using laptops and Tablet PCs as if it were one large seamless desktop.

Leigh says that TRECC was instrumental in providing the funding for the Continuum's research and development. In return, an entire Continuum system has been built for and deployed at the TRECC center in the DuPage Flight Center. "TRECC is providing a showroom for our research," says Leigh. The research and development of the continuum has benefited several other groups; Leigh cites the U. S. Geological Survey and its homeland security application, JuxtaView, as one of these. JuxtaView allows researchers or crisis workers to display aerial photography with resolutions of around 350,000 by 350,000 pixels, which would not display well at all on an ordinary desktop. "When USGS saw our technology, it made sense to them," Leigh says. "USGS has been one of the earliest adopters of the Continuum.s GeoWall technology. All of this was basically initiated by our first grant from TRECC."

The next big thing

One of the Continuum's new capabilities includes its ability to multicast high resolution visualizations. Known as TeraVision, the technology was demonstrated at the April 2004 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Private Sector Program Annual Meeting. Leigh remotely steered a graphics program from Chicago and streamed the pixels at 1280x1024 resolution and 30 frames per second to TRECC and to the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "This was the first time we had actually multicasted that high an image resolution," says Leigh. "What was particularly impressive, he says, was the amount of bandwidth that was required to stream the image -- around 500 Mbs of multicast bandwidth. The Access Grid, on average, sends about 20 Mbs.

Leigh sees this as evidence that the Continuum's capabilities may extend even beyond the project room of the future. "We see an increasing need for high bandwidth multicasting," he remarks. "As the entertainment industry switches to high-definition television and tries to figure out how to distribute all of their content digitally, high-bandwidth multicasting will probably be one of the important problems to be solved. What we're doing here allows us to understand what the issues will be."

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