A combination of technologies can allow people all over the world to witness extraordinary events.
An example project: The Matterhorn, August 2002. A mountaineer takes a leading-edge mobile phone on his ascent of the famous Swiss landmark and sends images and voice messages to the KMi lab in Milton Keynes, UK. Using software written for Macromedia's Flash and FlashCom Server technologies, we assembled a dynamic, multimedia website for this event. Viewers from around the globe tuned in and saw and heard live reports directly from the mountain. Replays of missed reports and photo ‘logs’ were available, and people could discuss the events using a live text chat facility.

The Xtreme Webcasting Demonstrator is available as an interactive replay of the live event via the link below:

Hexagon is a powerful presence tool allowing people to keep in touch with their colleagues wherever they are in the world (http://hexagon.open.ac.uk) and it will be a feature of Deliverable 2.3. It runs in a standard web browser using the standard Flash plug-in. Not only can you see their present 'state-of-being', or use the inbuilt text chat, as with many other types of software, and you can also actually see them working at their desk. A version of the hexagon client has been developed which is tailored for use on a PDA, allowing mobile users to connect to their community either via a wireless network or mobile phone network.

The Prolearn Mobile Hexagon client shown above right, is freely available at - http://hexagon.open.ac.uk/prolearn/lite/