KillerApp Sightings

The remote rural community of Baan Nong Pai in Thailand has joined the larger world, thanks to Sat-Ed's "Room for Life," a satellite-based broadband service providing e-mail, e-commerce, videoconferencing and an educational video-on-demand digital library.

Young people in the village have access for the first time to vocational and technical training; farmers can find information about new agricultural techniques; and local craftspeople can sell their wares on eBay. Residents can stay in touch through videoconferencing with family members who have moved to the city.

"Room for Life" is available at a learning center in the village. Most of the interactive content is delivered over IPTV, because adult residents are more comfortable with the TV-remote control interface than with the unfamiliar PC interface.

A video about the project can be seen here.

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The New World Symphony, a training orchestra in Miami, Florida, is using the experimental Internet2 to communicate with music schools at universities across the world. Master classes, seminars, rehearsals, auditions and symposia are among the musical exchanges now taking place on a regular basis.

Watch the NWS's artistic director, Michael Tilson Thomas, conducting an orchestra in Cleveland from his base in Miami.

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"Beatboxing," for those of you who aren't hip-hop experts, is a musical form featuring vocal percussion. Beatboxers create an astonishing variety of sounds and rhythms using only their own voices as instruments.

Even if you're not a beatboxing talent in the same league with Butterscotch or Max B, you can now produce your own beatbox performances. At a new Verizon Broadband Web site, BeatBoxMixer.com, you can practice mixing beatbox clips, using sounds recorded by beatbox stars. Start by choosing a lead vocalist, add in some "flavor" from two other beatboxers, then save your mix and share it with your friends.

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Industrial designers and movie animators can share their 3D graphics over the Internet, using Remote Graphics Software from Hewlett Packard. Even remote users who have ordinary workstations and no access to the underlying data or applications can see and interact with sophisticated 3D designs created elsewhere.

Geographically dispersed teams can review designs without flying around the world for meetings; designers can work from home or from the road; instructors can conduct Web-based design training. At high enough network speeds, the experience is “just like local.”

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A situation room in Chicago is the prototype for a new kind of crisis management center. A giant tiled wall display lets scientists and government officials see real-time imagery of disasters overlaid on city, regional and national maps in high detail. More visual information is available on a large tiled display table over which mouse-like interaction devices are moved.

Image courtesy of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Some scientific problems, like simulating the arteries in the human body or screening all known chemical compounds for pharmaceutical use, require so much computing power that even the largest supercomputers balk at them. Scientists are using high-speed connections to string multiple supercomputers together, and tackling these problems with all the computing power at their disposal.

An emerging set of standards and protocols allows computers to perform "grid computing" over the Internet or other networks

This image, showing a simulation of human arteries, was created at the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory, from a visualization by Joseph Insley, using Teragrid resources.

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Dancers Renata Sheppard and Lisa Wymore recently performed together, thousands of miles apart, while viewing each other in 3D. To people watching the performance onscreen, the two dancers appeared to be on the same stage. The dance is shown in this video -- watch for the virtual “hug” at the end of the performance. (Windows Media Player needed.)

The dance was part of the TEEVE ("Tele-Immersive Environment for EVErybody") project of the computer science departments at the University of Illinois and University of California.

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The National Weather Service says the East Coast is in for a "very active" hurricane season in 2006. The agency is now sharing radar data from its network of next-generation Doppler radars, allowing scientists to analyze these enormous datasets with supercomputers. High-speed connections enable researchers to develop accurate models and forecasts of severe storms in real time.

Other scientific projects have also benefited from high-speed sharing of huge files. For example, archeologists all over the world are viewing CT scans of mummies made at the University of Pennsylvania, while astronomers search sky surveys at the University of Illinois’ National Virtual Observatory and review NASA data collected by a spacecraft trailing a comet.

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High-school students now have real-time access from their classrooms to the Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope at Lehigh University's Nanocharacterization Lab, via Internet2. Students can see microbes enlarged to look like monsters, grains of salt bearing a strong resemblance to Mayan pyramids, and mysterious jungle scenery that turns out to be Velcro. (NASA is also remotely using Lehigh’s electron microscope, as well as other Nanocharacterization Lab equipment, in order to develop technology for a new space telescope, Mars rovers and spacecraft.)

Dr. John Mansfield talks about remote electron microscopy in this QuickTime video clip.

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GeoFusion offers virtual flythroughs of the Red Planet with datasets from NASA. Viewers can use mouse and keyboard to navigate to Martian features like Gusev and Karst. (You'll also need a video graphics card suitable for gaming.)

Using other free datasets, viewers can fly around Earth, reviewing the devastation wrought by the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, tracking the receding polar icecaps, and landing on the continents of their choice. For a fee, the company will create custom flythroughs that you can show on your own Web site.

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A Japanese company, iSeePet, is marketing an Internet-connected device for office workers who can't get home in time to feed their pets. When the owner activates the device, it emits a whistle to call the animal and then releases a serving of food into a dish. A built-in videocamera streams pictures back to the owner.

Now, if it could only walk the dog.

The iSeePet video will make you glad you don't work in Japan.

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Rehabilitation therapists can now operate robotic controls remotely, helping patients in out-of-the-way places perform the physical therapy they need to recover the use of their limbs. Stroke specialists have tested the system, which was developed at Saint Francis University in Pennsylvania, to help rural stroke victims learn to use their arms and hands again.

Another possible application of the technology would allow soldiers wounded in action to return to their homes, rather than staying for months at the specialized clinics in Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals.

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Your boss sends you on a business trip the same night your team is playing, and their games aren't broadcast in the city where you're going. You could record the game and watch it when you get back, but it’s a lot more suspenseful when you don’t already know who won.

The solution: Watch it on your laptop. Or on your mobile phone. The Slingbox redirects, or "placeshifts," a live TV stream from a cable box, satellite receiver or DVR via the Internet to your PC; SlingPlayer Mobile sends the stream to your mobile phone.

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What the rest of us call terrorism, the U.S. military calls asymmetric warfare. The Defense Department's Center for Asymmetric Warfare conducts antiterrorism testing, training and experimentation for military expeditionary forces and for first responders at home. The agency uses the ultra-high-speed Defense Research and Engineering Network for communications and control, as well as for simulation-based training. Modeling and simulations are based on a variety of government and commercial mapping applications, such as Battlescape and ARCview.

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Controlling telescopes remotely is becoming almost routine for astronomers at Internet2 universities. High-speed connections to the telescopes are vital because of the quantity of data required to adjust the telescopes’ positions in real time.

If controlling a single telescope isn't enough for you, you can operate as many as 20 telescopes, scattered across the globe, that have been linked together to act like a single machine. Data from the entire array of telescopes is streamed at high speeds to a single site, where it is consolidated.

This spiral galaxy with a supernova was photographed with a telescope operated over the public Internet, using a facility called Hands-On Universe:

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