Towards a networked multimedia environment

Considerable work has been done to develop workstations capable of handling continuous media such as video and voice. The majority of this work has concentrated on stand alone applications running on a single workstation with very little interaction with other workstations. However, if the full potential of multimedia is to be realised it must be supported across both wide and local area networks enabling workers in separate buildings and laboratories to work in a truly cooperative fashion. Lancaster University are in the process of setting up an experimental configuration, based on the results of research over the last three years (1989-92), to allow them to investigate the problems of providing a networked multimedia environment. The experimental configuration and the various hardware and software components that are required to provide the necessary infrastructure are described