Vaudeville: A High Performance, Voice Activated Teleconferencing Application

Jyoti K. Parwatikar, A. Maynard Engebretson, T. Paul McCartney, John D. Dehart, Kenneth J. Goldman

We present a voice-activated, hands-free, ATM-based video conferencing application. The application, called Vaudeville, features high quality NTSC video, voice-activated audio transmission, audio bridging of two audio streams, and voice-activated video switching. It supports multiple simultaneous multi-party conferences using a scalable multicast mechanism. Users can move freely between conferences without knowledge of the underlying network structure. We describe how Vaudeville was built using a component-based distributed programming environment. We also describe the algorithms used to control the audio and video of the application. Audio and video are encoded in hardware using a platform-independent, ATM hardware multimedia interface.

KEYWORDS: ATM, distributed computing, multimedia, video conferencing

Technical report version is available as postscript (.ps) or compressed postscript (.ps.Z).

To appear in Multimedia Tools and Applications.

Washington University Department of Computer Science WUCS-96-18, June 1996.

Prepared by T. Paul McCartney (paul@cs.wustl.edu)

Washington University Department of Computer Science