The Connection Project will evolve from an initial emphasis on high-definition digital video links between meeting rooms within School of Information buildings, to a network of rooms across the
University of Michigan 
campuses, and eventually to connections with similarly equipped rooms around the world. The project aims to extend the use of video beyond formal meetings to encompass the kinds of spontaneous encounters that are so important to an organization’s life but which have been a challenge to support at a distance. Finally, the project will be a testbed for collaboration technologies such as presence awareness tools for mobile devices and portlet-based collaboration environments.
Phase I: Linking SI
The first phase of the Connection Project will involve the construction of a distributed meeting room between the School of Information’s Central Campus and North Campus locations. This installation will feature higher quality performance than available off-the-shelf systems can deliver (e.g., H.323-based videoconferencing).
First, for audio and video transmission, the room will employ uncompressed digital video (DV) – with a move to high-definition digital video when the technology is mature. The fidelity and format of the DV images will be highly realistic, showing near life-size images of remote participants on a large, wide aspect display.
Second, the rooms will use Teravision, an open source protocol, to share images such as application screens or presentations. Teravision accepts input from any device with a standard computer display output, so the range of shareable images is unlimited.
Finally, the distributed meeting room will be equipped with conventional videoconferencing capabilities, such as high-end Polycom units and Access Grid resources, to enable connections outside of SI. The backbone for the SI distributed meeting room will be a dedicated high-performance network running over existing fiber between Central and North Campus. Special attention will be paid to lighting and microphone placement to ensure the best video and audio quality.
Phase II: Linking UM
The second phase of the Connection Project will apply the SI distributed meeting room experience to create similar bridges within other distributed groups and units at the University of Michigan. Early targets for deployment would be high-performing research groups that are distributed across multiple locations.
The second phase also would involve deployment in classroom spaces, such as a distributed auditorium between Central and North Campus, to facilitate attendance and engagement in shared events such as guest talks and interdisciplinary courses.
Phase III: Support for long-distance encounters
Unplanned meetings, such as hallway encounters and conversations around the coffee pot, are essential to the health of collaborations. Such chance encounters can be the occasion, for example, to provide status updates on a shared project or to identify a new theme for further work. But unplanned meetings are hard to achieve at a distance.
In the third phase of the Connection Project, we will deploy technology to create the experience of a virtual hallway encounter so that people at geographically dispersed sites can have more chances for informal interaction. The elements of this phase include the DV distributed meeting room technology described earlier but now installed in public spaces, such as lounges or other gathering places.
To allow public encounters to continue in more private settings, we will augment the large-scale DV displays with stand-up stations or kiosks for brief interaction, and with sit-down stations or booths for more extended interactions.
