Distributed group collaborative work through the “Symmetric TV” model B. Jerman-Blazic a, * , L. Yamamoto b,1 , P. Drabik c,2 , A. Hallan d,3 a Laboratory for Open Systems and Networks, Institut Jozef Stefan, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia b KPN Research, St. Paulusstraat, 4, 2264 XZ Leidschendam, The Netherlands c KPN Research, St. Paulusstraat, 4, 2264 XZ Leidschendam, Netherlands d Halan Management Services, 145 route de Luxembourg, L-7374 Helmdange, Luxembourg 1. Introduction The concept of Symmetric TV 4 was introduced by the project NICE-GLOBAL [1,2]. The project “NICE”, which stands for “National Host Inter Connection Experiments”, belongs to the High Speed Networking area of the ACTS Programme, (ACTS-Advanced Communication Technolo- gies and Services is a part of the IV Framework program of European Union). NICE officially started in April 1996 and finished in the beginning of 1998. The NICE consortium was an impressive aggregate of network operators, research institutes and universities in Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Canada with acknowledged expertise in advanced communications. The primary goal of NICE was to integrate, test and demonstrate most advanced teleconferencing and tele-meet- ing facilities running over broadband ATM networks. These applications are now available as Permanent Platform facil- ities provided within the National Hosts of participating countries. The facilities within NICE that support broad- band applications consist of equipment, software, ATM- connections between different National Hosts via the European ATM network and guidelines for the use of the provided services. The term National Host is used to describe a national organised platform of the consortium that provides technical resources such as access to experimental networks (like ATM), provision of links between related research and education projects/partners using the networks within and outside the ACTS project. National Hosts are mainly located in Europe, but in the future they will also be located on other continents like America (Canada), Africa or Asia. National Hosts are also contact points for partners working on ACTS and Telematics projects. An additional objective of the project was to integrate non-profit organisations mainly from educational or research sector in the Central and Eastern European countries (CEE) and the New inde- pendent states (NIS), promoting wide civilian use of advanced communications services and technologies devel- oped in Europe and later on world-wide especially in the field of research and education. In order to validate the fulfilment of the tasks and the usability of the developed technology regularly distributed events were performed. The distributed events had different content, organisational schemes and addressed different audiences. Some of them were summer schools, some were tele-meetings, some were distributed conferences with participation of real conferences held in different conti- nents and some were workshops with tutorials and other educational materials. The tests and the experiments were performed on broad band networks but sites with narrow band facilities were also part of the underlying infrastruc- ture. One of the results of the project was the introduction of the Symmetric TV model of communication. The concept and the real use in a distributed event was introduced in June 1997 during the global 360 event [5,6]. Later it was repeated several times during workshops and other distrib- uted events. This paper briefly describes the TV Symmetric concept, the underlying technology and discuss the experi- ences gathered in distributed events. 2. The Symmetric TV concept The project NICE organised several experiments with different tele-services that ran on top of broadband digital networks, such as summer schools and workshops. Based on the experience accumulated during several successful trials, the project partners created the Symmetric TV model. Symmetric TV is the combination of multiparty confer- encing with TV production techniques to produce attractive Computer Communications 22 (1999) 1644–1651 0140-3664/99/$ - see front matter  1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0140-3664(99)00148-6 * Corresponding author. Tel.: + 386-61-177-3408. E-mail addresses: borka@e5.ijs.si (B. Jerman-Blazic); l.a.r.yamamo- to@research.kpn.com (L. Yamamoto); p.drabik@researchkpn.com (P. Drabik); andrew.hallan@hallan.lu (A. Hallan) 1 Tel.: + 31-70-332-50-92. 2 Tel.: + 31-70-332-50-16. 3 Tel.: + 352-33-98-21. 4 Trademark of Belgacom. www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom