![[KMi Stadium]](gifs/stadium2.GIF)
Right now, KMi Stadium is several things: it is a medium, an environment, a software prototype, a home base, and a metaphor for a variety of activities we are undertaking. When we talk about 'hosting an event in the KMi Stadium', we mean that we provide the (free) client and (proprietary) server software in which customisable and scaleable events of various kinds can take place, ranging from small-room 'fireside chats', to enormous football-stadium-like activities, as appropriate. We use 'Stadium' as the all-encompassing metaphor, even when it implies a much larger event than we are hosting at any moment, because it conveniently reminds us that scaleability is one of the major challenges we face. Since the 'veneer' presented by KMi Stadium is customisable, running small-scale events is easy within the KMi Stadium framework. Large-scale events rely on linked servers distributed across several continents. Our immediate goal is to host an event with 100,000 participants by the end of 1996. The three keys to scaleability are (i) the distributed server environment, (ii) local cacheing of all 'special effects' such as laughter, applause and slide shows, and (iii) a simple hierarchy of moderators and meta-moderators to field audience questions and comments.
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Caveat concerning Java
KMi Stadium is implemented using Sun Microsystems' Java. This enables the Stadium client to execute
the code on your local machine which performs many of the tricks needed to help
create a sense of presence during Stadium events. Therefore, a Java-aware
browser is necessary to run the full KMi Stadium. However, we are making
a prototype KMi Stadium available for non-Java-aware browsers, which will
enable you to get an overview of the intended look and feel of KMi Stadium, but
naturally without all the fancy buttons and special effects. When you look at
the tour below, you will therefore be seeing static
proto-Stadium views.
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Examples of how KMi Stadium will be used
KMi Maven of the
Month: This is a 30-minute interview with a leading knowledge media
researcher or personality ('maven' = expert or connoisseur), conducted live in
the first instance and then available as an on-demand replay, with opportunities
for group discussion both during and after the event. These interviews extend
the 'talk radio' format (and indeed we refer to the transmission medium for the
audio portion of these events as KMi Radio) by adding
static and updatable images, slow-frame video, QuickTime movies, audience
questions and sound effects to enhance the presentations. Unlike Internet Relay
Chat or conference/auditorium events held by the big on-line service providers,
we place extensive emphasis on auditory and visual communication, and encourage
visual and verbal interactions to take place anywhere in the world. Follow the
hot-link at the beginning of this paragraph for details of past and future
events.
Professional Update Master Class: For professionals who need fast-turnaround technical updates and career enhancement training, KMi Stadium provides a master class environment in which a renowned subject specialist can provide personalised tuition, even when great distances are involved. This model builds upon the Open University's acknowledged expertise in distance learning methods, and offers a 'mix and match' approach to team up subject experts with customers expressing specific needs. Unlike videoconference tutorials, KMi Stadium master classes facilitate ready 'desktop involvement', serve the needs of self-organising tutorial groups and enable on-demand replays for interested parties anywhere on the Internet. Moreover, scaleability is designed in from the beginning.
International symposia: Large international conferences and symposia are a natural activity to be hosted in KMi Stadium. Remote attendees can participate from around the world at their own desktops, and the presenters can benefit from the composite feedback provided by the KMi Stadium Server. Consider a symposium presentation involving 2,000 attendees on-line. If half of those attendees 'applaud' via their personal Stadium client software, then a 'canned applause' accurately representing 1,000 (out of 2,000) people applauding is faithfully reproduced not only via the server, but also via each user's client with a negligible delay. Every client receives synchronised media events as well (including slide shows, audio, movies), and the interaction with the presenter is limited (as in a real symposium) only by the number of questions that can be fielded by the moderator.
Syndicate: Large workshops or conferences often spin off smaller 'syndicates' in which handfuls of participants congregate in separate meeting rooms to focus on specialised issues. The syndicates each select a 'rapporteur' who reports back to the main conference session. KMi Stadium provides arbitrary side-meeting rooms for just the purpose. Self-selecting groups can congregate and engage in smaller sessions, with the rapporteur running a reduced-scale version of the Stadium Server. By relying on just the rapporteurs to report back to main conference session, an important step towards scaleability is achieved. Within each syndicate, multiple audio conversations are allowed, with a designated person authorising turn-taking.
Town meeting: The emphasis in a town meeting is on the exchange of viewpoints, and it is therefore of crucial importance that KMi Stadium not be merely a 'passive transmission' medium. For this reason, the Stadium software includes several ways for attendees to make their views known, including standard 'voting' buttons and (more significantly) the ability to provide feedback via such enhanced audio methods as applause and laughter.
Specialist and celebrity netcasts: A new kind of news 'mediumcast' is emerging, in which KMi Stadium can present events that are of fairly widespread specialised interest, yet not considered to be worthy of airtime on the major television networks. Examples might include the official launch of new charities by ministers or members of the Royal Family, sporting events of interest to expatriates, and public lectures by noted art historians.
20/20 Hindsight: This is what Americans would call 'Monday morning quarterbacking', i.e. analysing an event in detail after it has taken place. But why do it alone? Interested parties can participate in on-demand replays of any of the above activities at a convenient moment, and join a community of others to share and discuss the experience. Moreover, this works using technology that runs on today's Internet infrastructure.
Here is a walk-through of the prototype KMi Stadium for non-Java-aware browsers, as described in the caveat. All of these snapshots are taken from a KMi Stadium event which ran on 18th October, 1995 [Maven of the Month interview with Henry Lieberman, MIT Media Lab]
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Related work
Here are some software environments that we have experimented with, and that have
influenced our thinking:
1. Custom Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients such as Homer allow users to monitor the existence of many thousands of participants at once, clustered into numerous 'channels' (interest areas), with one-to-one and one-to-many teletype discussions taking place at once. The same is starting to happen for genuine voice discussions. (see 3)
2. CompuServe's CB (Citizen's Band radio) simulator allows something similar, and also provides very convenient views of who's online overall as well as private 'side chats', 'group chats', etc.... these are not unlike FirstClass public/private chats, but scaleable to very large numbers in a nicer way.
3. VocalTec's Internet Phone allows a pretty nice global overview of all lurkers, plus private side chats (and cheap international phone calls). A full-duplex version is available, allowing naturalistic interruptions to occur during conversations (i.e. both people speaking at once).
4. CU-SeeMe (Internet videoconferencing) provides an overview of moderate numbers of 'lurkers', and allows one-to-many or one-to-one live audio conversations, with a modest number of on-screen video windows present at once.
5. Progressive Networks' RealAudio (Audio on demand for the Internet) provides a key infrastructure technology that allows people to partake in live events anywhere on the Internet via dial-up modem.
6. Xing Technologies' StreamWorks (Streaming video and audio) enables high-bandwidth users to participate in cable-TV-style experiences across the Internet.
7. CompuServe's Convention Center allows a moderator to deal with a queue of questions from the audience. I participated as an audience member one evening when the guest was George Martin (of Beatles fame), with some 55 people in the audience. The teletype interactions were tedious, but interesting nevertheless. Prodigy claims to be building a convention center that will allow up to 1000 members at a time to participate in events (and Apple's eWorld has something similar).
8. Ubique's Virtual Places (TM) offers a special server (Sesame) that, when running along side an httpd server, tells any (free-Sesame-client-owning) visitor to that Web site who else is on, and displays little icons (any GIF image in fact) for each lurker, floating above the Web page, at locations that each lurker self-determines! Lurkers can have private chats by teletype or genuine voice (using the same audio technology as Internet Phone), and can even join a 'tour guide' in a 2-person or 10-person 'tour bus' to go cruising anywhere on the Web under the leadership of the (self-appointed) tour guide. This is a very important concept that they refer to as 'virtual places'.
9. WorldsAway is an enhancement of the MOO/chat theme (see 9), in which you select your own 'avatar' (cartoon-like personality, choosing from a library of identi-kit parts). You can use a set of buttons/menus to move/teleport to new locations (with other people on-line moving to the same place, if you like), and your teletype 'chat' lines are displayed in coloured cartoon-like bubbles, which give a very nice look and feel. Customisable rooms & furniture are provided.
10. Our own Virtual Summer School convinced me that we could do it 'properly', on a massive scale, provided that we could convey a genuine sense of presence. Good audio was of utmost importance in creating a sense of excitement and presence.
11. Even teletype-oriented MUD/MOO (Multi-user-domains, Object Oriented) environments allow a modest sense of presence by, for example, encouraging/forcing people to 'sit' in certain 'locations', from which they can only chat/gossip to people in the same location, have to ask permission to address the entire 'room', etc.
12. Bill Buxton's work on 'augmented reality' emphasises the importance of augmenting current interfaces so that we can capture subtleties such as gaze-awareness and naturalistic gestures (as opposed to simple mouse clicks, which are unnecessarily impoverished).
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Acknowledgements
Who makes KMi Stadium work? Adam Freeman (code) and Jon Linney (graphics)!
But many others have played a crucial role in making it happen smoothly and on an increasing scale. The following people are all Open University members of staff (unless otherwise stated):
Copyright © The Open University, 1995, all rights reserved. Comments to: M.Eisenstadt@open.ac.uk