Bright orange roof tiles in Croatia. A harp with invisible laser strings. A geothermal camera in Kosovo. A multipoint videoconference conducted in American Sign Language. An automated page-turning book digitizer. Where could you see all of these at once? In the WoW Center at RIT's ImagineRIT Innovation & Creativity Festival. How? By means of the RIT Global Collaboration Grid.

Live, interactive audio and video streamed in from more than a dozen locations on the RIT campus and from RIT campuses abroad. Using mostly DV quality video at 30 Mbps and Gigabit networks on campus, all of RIT's sites around the globe were connected in one big videoconference displayed on large 52" LCD screens.

External sites streamed in from the American University of Kosovo, the American College of Management and Technology in Croatia, NTID's sister institution, Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., and RIT's new Alliance partner, Rochester General Health Systems.

On-campus sites included the Wallace Library, the Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, the Center for Imaging Science, the Munsell Color Science Lab, and the WoW Center in the Gordon Field House.

The Virtual Theatre Project broadcast a performance and the Rochester Museum and Science Center gave simultaneous live demonstrations in the WoW Center and in the Center for Student Innovation connected via the grid.

The Global Collaboration Grid is a research infrastructure built from commodity components, including consumer camcorders, LCD TVs, computers built from parts as well as donated by corporations. The software basis is the Access Grid, an open source project funded by the Department of Energy and managed by Argonne National Lab.

The Global Grid will be used for distance learning, telehealth applications, research collaborations, cultural events, and business meetings. It will build connected communities from the geographically separated parts of RIT and provide students with hands-on advanced research technology experience and researchers with fundable opportunities to advance the state of the art.

The RIT Global Collaboration Grid is an initiative of the ICELab, a part of the Research Computing Department. See http://ICELab.rit.edu for more information.

For more information visit http://ICELab.rit.edu.