Testing EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations)

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I am testing EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations), a videoconferencing and telework system developed by Caltech. I have been introduced to EVO by friends working at CERN. In fact, the EVO system has been developed to provide an improved system and a service to the LHC and other major High Energy Physics programs. It is worth noting that CERN is the birth place of the Web. A few weeks ago, CERN celebrated 20 years of the web: “Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled “Information Management : a Proposal”. “Vague, but exciting” is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.”.

Indeed the Web has changed the world forever. Among other things, it has done a lot to enable virtual organizations: now a team of people sharing a common business, cultural or social interest can collaborate, up to a certain degree, independently of their physical locations. I consider this as a terribly important trend that will empower people to do what they want to do while living where they want to live (provided the obsolete regulations and politics of dinosaur nation states don’t get in the way). This will give people more options for quality of life and happiness, which is what really matters. I follow all new developments to enable persons in remote locations to work together efficiently, because it is important.

At this moment EVO seems a secret only known to high energy physicists and the professional scientific community, and there are very few users outside. Yet, anyone can create a free account and start collaborating with others. The first impression of EVO is a multimedia IRC with voice, video, desktop sharing and file sharing capabilities. Every user can join a community and create a public or private meeting area. Users in a meeting can chat with text, voice and webcam video, share files, and share their desktop. The system is based on Java. In the image above the video window has the webcam feed of a user (yours truly) who is also sharing the part of his desktop bordered in red. This permits, for example, showing a PPT presentation or a website. Below the video window there is a common whiteboard and on the side of the video window there is the main EVO window with the main directory and the text chat area.

The quality of video and voice is good but not (yet?) as good as Skype. On the other hand EVO permits having group videoconferences, which is not possible with Skype whose video capabilities are limited to two persons at the moment. Oovoo permits group videoconferences, and Dimdim permits group videoconferences with whiteboarding, file and desktop sharing features, but their performance and quality seem worse than Skype and not better then EVO. In summary EVO is a terribly interesting system with a star pedigree and possibly a big impact and very bright future.

On April 28, 2009, at its annual Spring Member Meeting, Internet2 announced that the “Enabling Virtual Organizations” or EVO application has been awarded the 2009 Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Award: “The annual Internet2 IDEA award seeks to recognize leading innovators who have created and deployed advanced network applications that have enabled transformational progress in research, teaching and learning. EVO, developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a videoconferencing and desktop sharing system designed to provide a seamless real-time collaboration platform for bridging remotely located collaborators and resources in support of science and research. Originally designed to meet the unique and demanding needs of the High Energy Physics (HEP) community, EVO is today in wide and continual use by thousands of collaborators in many disciplines, as well as by many groups of educators and students worldwide.”.

EVOGH Inc., a California Corporation, was established to commercialize EVO technologies. From their presentation material: “EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations) is a distributed, highly functional, and efficient software agent-based collaboration system for video, audio and web collaboration over global networks. EVO supports a true Internet “managed secure peer-to-peer” architecture with automatic network software server failover, to ensure very high availability and overall system robustness. EVO enables an unlimited number of simultaneous conferences of any size across the various networks.”. The EVOGH website has a downloadable EVO lite application and a contact address to order a full version.

I will definitely continue to experiment with EVO in both its free hosted version and its commercial version, and have great expectations for the evolution of the system. Yet it is worth noting that the features are not new: Qwaq Forums has all these and more features, for example a native collaborative web browser and collaborative editing of Microsoft and Open Office documents, and in a full 3D virtual reality environment where the possibility to organize the workspace in 3D permits a less cluttered and more ergonomical user interface. Qwaq Forums is a commercial system but there are indications that the open source Cobalt project may develop open source equivalents. Yet it is difficult to sell things called “virtual worlds” to corporate users, and I am beginning to thing that the distinctive feature of VR worlds, humanoid avatars, is actually seen as a weakness by many users (too many unwanted associations with toon sex in Second Life etc.). Perhaps it would be easier to sell 3D collaborative environments where users are represented by less personal icons, like cubes with pictures and webcam feeds.

Posted by giulio on 05/10 at 07:15 AM
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