Lead sector	Other sectors	Start	Project Duration in Months
RESEARCH		1 December 1995	24

Project Objectives, Summary description and anticipated results:

The objective of the project is to provide all the technology components, other than the data network itself, to support collaborative RTD through the deployment of enhanced tools for European multimedia collaboration in Europe. The project will improve existing toolsets developed by the collaborators in many important aspects:
- Better integration of the facilities, and therefore more easily useable by untrained users;

- Better capability for higher quality video, audio and shared workspace facilities;

- Inter-operable cross-platform support for many systems - UNIX workstations, PCs and MACs

- Better support for the introduction and recording of multimedia information in conferences;

- Support for different network technologies - mainly over IP: packet-switched, ATM or SMDS and ISDN;

- Inter-operation between workstations running the multicast Internet and the normal CCITT procedures;

- Facilities for secure conferencing - with easy distribution of keys and information;

- Distributed measurement, monitoring and control

Verification activities will be pursued both inside the project and in other Telematics projects:

- Regular research seminars given from the sites of the partners - and from North America

- Annual interactive workshops in invasive surgery given at UCL - transmitted internationally, and with some operations coming from other countries;

- Industrial trials with commercial organisations including our sponsoring partners Hewlett Packard & Shell

- Use in the research community, including by our sponsoring partner UKERNA and by other Telematics projects including MANICORAL and COBROW.

Besides tools from earlier EU projects, it will utilise results from concurrent Telematics projects:

- Security tools from the ICE-TEL and the Distributed Shared Visualisation tool from MANICORAL.

Major Validation sites:

Institution/ Organisations	City/Town + Postal Code	Region	Country
UCL	London WC1E 6BT	UK55	GB
GMD	Darmstadt 64202	DEA2	DE
INRIA	Sophia Antipolis 06902	FR82	FR
KTH	Stockholm 164 40	SE01	SE
UiO	Oslo 0316	NO	NO
RUS	Stuttgart 70550	DE11	DE
Teles	Berlin 10587	DE3	DE
Middlesex Hospital	London W1P 6DB	UK55	GB
Sahlgrenska University Hospital	Gothenburg S-413 45	SE052	SE
Hewlett-Packard	Bristol BS12 6QZ	UK61	GB
Hewlett-Packard	Villefontaine 38090	FR71	FR
Shell Research	Thornton CH2 4NX	UK81	GB
Shell Research	Amsterdam 1031CM	NL32	NL
UKERNA	Didcot OX11 0QS	UK52	GB

Other Characteristics of the Project:

Users Involved
Students and research workers - in the regular seminars, conferences and remote teaching; doctors and medical students - in the medical workshops; computer equipment users and technicians - in the training seminars; office users and researchers - in the industrial trials.
Technologies and/or approach used
Packet technology; highly compressed audio, video and shared workspace; multimedia servers; security technology; distributed management and control; broad spectrum of network technologies: packet data, ISDN, ATM, & MAN - CCITT and Internet procedures
Expected benefits for the citizen
This technology will have a very broad impact. It will be broadly applicable in education, industrial research and medicine - which affect all citizens.
Expected benefits for the users of the application
The applications will set the tone for the use of audio/visual techniques and shared whiteboard in tele-teaching, remote consultation of doctors, and many other similar disciplines. Clearly several industrial organisations will investigate how their business can be helped by the technology.
Expected benefits for the European Industries
There should be benefits from the User industries, in improving their productivity by use of the techniques pioneered in MERCI; it is also vital that the supplier industry get a better feel for the impact of the technology on their products
Contribution to EU-policies
It is the policy of the EU in the communications part of their programme to pioneer the use of multimedia and of international standards; in the Global Information Infrastructure discussions, they are promoting international collaboration and cooperative working over high-speed networks. The MERCI concentration on standard hardware and software solutions for European-wide and international multimedia, collaborative working furthers both the EU dissemination policies, and their aim to further developments that should be profitably to exploited by European indust/ry.

Coordinator:

Institution/ Organisations	City + Postal Code	Region	Country
University College London	London WC1E 6BT	UK55	GB
Parent company	Controlling Company (Country)
n/a	n/a

Contact person from the Coordinating Contractor:

Title, First Name, Name	Professor Peter Kirstein	Address:	Gower St, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
Tel:	+44 171 380 7286	Fax:	+44 171 387 1397
E-mail 1:	kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk	E-mail 2:

Other Contractors:

SE01

Participants Code	Name of Institution/Organisation	City + Postal Code	Region	Country
C 2	GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH	Darmstadt, D-64204	DE 71	DE
C3	Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique	Nice, 06902	FR 82	FR
C4	Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan	Kista, 16440	SE
C5	University of Oslo	Oslo, N-0316	NO	NO
C6	Rechenzentrum U Stuttgart	Stuttgart, 70174	DE11	DE
C7	Teles	Berlin, 10587	DE3	DE

Last Updated: 18 December 1996 - telematics@terena.nl (hosted by the SCIMITAR project)