The Minister of Education of Kosovo addresses students at the American University of Kosovo--while he is visiting ImagineRIT in Rochester.

Croatian students at RIT talk with fellow students at the American College of Management and Technology in Dubrovnik.

The head of an engineering school from the Dominican Republic, while visiting RIT, looks in on a class going on in Santo Domingo.

How is this possible? RIT's ImagineRIT Innovation & Creativity Festival featured the RIT Global Collaboration Grid, which connected all the above sites with real-time, high quality video and audio streams simultaneously.

Live, interactive audio and video streamed in from more than a dozen locations on the RIT campus and from RIT campuses abroad. Using standard definition video at 2 Mbps and high definition streams at 20 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.

Visitors at the Rochester General Health Systems booth could watch visitors coming and going through the main entrance of the hospital.

Deaf and hard of hearing students from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT had animated discussions with students across campus in the Library and in the Student Alumni Union and could view the campus of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. at the same time.

Visitors at the Center for Student Innovation saw the visitors across the campus in the Field House over high definition video.

The Virtual Theatre Project broadcast a performance and the One Laptop per Child project broadcast from their lab over the Collaboration Grid.

The Global Collaboration Grid showcases the advanced research and development projects that students, staff, and faculty are engaged in with their educational, industrial, and government partners.

The Global Grid is used for distance learning, telehealth applications, research collaborations, cultural events, and business meetings. It builds connected communities from the geographically separated parts of RIT and provides 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.