TeraVision: a high resolution graphics streaming device for amplified collaboration environments

One of the common problems faced in amplified collaboration environments (ACEs), such as the Continuum, is termed the 'Display docking' or 'Display Pushing' problem where the visualization or the presentation generated on one or more computers, has to be distributed to remote sites for viewing by a group of collaborators. A typical image source in such a case could be computers ranging from laptops showing presentations, to compute clusters number crunching terabytes of data and rendering high resolution visualizations. In this paper, we present a platform independent solution which is capable of transmitting multiple high resolution video streams from such video sources to one or more destinations. The unique capability of this concept is that it is a completely hardware oriented solution, where no special software/hardware has to be installed on the source or destination machines to enable them to transmit their video. These multiple streams can either be independent of each other or they might be component streams of a video system, such as a tiled display or stereoscopic display. We shall also present results with testing on high speed dedicated long haul networks, and local area gigabit LANs with different Layer 4 protocols.