[Sugar-devel] GSoC Proposal: Multimedia Broadcasting

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 12:02 AM, Geza Kovacs <gkovacs at mit.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Eben Eliason <eben at laptop.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It sounds as if your proposal is not so much an activity as the ability to
>>> screencast whatever you're doing on the XO, p2p. And it would be even better
>>> if the "watchers" had the ability to participate. Chris Ball has already
>>
>> I've put some time into thinking about this idea from an interaction
>> perspective. It's a really exciting concept, and I'd be happy to
>> provide design help if needed!
>>
>
> Thanks for the responses. While I did consider the usefulness of
> VNC-type remote desktop control interaction, which "Multi-point remote
> desktop" seems to be, considering the fact that for most activities
> like Write or Paint, the ability to instantly share and update data
> already accomplishes much of the "collaboration" aspect, I don't see
> how this would be any more useful in a practical context than just
> straight-out Google Docs-type collaboration. Additionally, this
> wouldn't be a very general solution for collaboration in activities,
> since the behavior and response to multiple pointers, and the
> associated conflicts when two users are attempting to accomplish
> conflicting goals for each activity would differ enough that this
> "share" functionality would likely have to be re-implemented for each
> activity.

Right. I'm actually on board with this point. I think VNC-style remote
multi-pointer collaboration could be cool, but I, like you, also think
there's plenty of benefit to be gained simply from the ability to
"watch" someone else: either a single activity, or their full screen.

> I perhaps didn't quite clarify enough that I intend for this to be
> used primarily in "presenter-directed" activities oriented towards
> demonstrations to be viewed by the entire class, rather than
> one-on-one student-to-student interaction as these other tools seem to

That's definitely a really beneficial case. I also see this being used
for "limited" collaborative activities, such as a chess game, in which
only two players can play, but any number of others could observe the
game.

> focus on. Thus examples of such situations would be where a teacher is
> displaying a live lab experiment (in the context of broadcasting the
> external webcam and audio input) or displaying how to use a particular
> activity to the class (in the context of broadcasting the X11 output).
> In this context, given that the students are more passive learners
> that raise questions than active participants, I believe that the best
> form of interaction, if any, would be annotation; as in the student
> circles a term in an equation that they don't understand, or point out
> something in the video they want the teacher to clarify; that way the
> teacher can receive the input without disrupting the presentation.

That's an interesting idea. I hadn't considered the idea that there
would be feedback/annotation on the "watched" screen.

> To summarize, this is essentially more of an attempt to replicate what
> projectors, presentations, and laser pointers are used for today
> (broadcasting info to the students and soliciting their feedback),
> rather than an activity-specific rich-immersion one-on-one student
> collaboration attempt. The advantage is merely convenience; if the
> student is receiving the stream from the teacher, he can view it from
> the convenience of his laptop, or he can for example pause, rewind, or
> record the stream if it's being cached, which he would be unable to do

Yup, this is the biggest win I see. The ability to take notes via
screen-grabs would be phenomenal. Maybe we could support annotation of
these screen captures (text, scribble/image) instead of, or in
addition to, annotation on the "watched" screen.

> if the teacher is merely displaying information on a projector. Thus I
> don't really believe that any of these existing tools are quite
> adapted to this niche; both video chat and activity sharing are too
> specialized towards one-on-one interaction.
>
> If this idea isn't really considered interesting, I could of course
> revise my proposal to introduce more rich and direct forms of
> interaction. I merely believe that this more conservative approach
> would be more appealing to teachers who have grown up teaching with
> projector-based presentations all their life, and would be more
> immediately useful and require less maintenance by introducing no
> activity-specific code.

Yeah, I think that's a good approach, myself.

>> They way I've envisioned it working is to add a "watch" option to
>> every shared activity (in addition to the usual "join" option), which
>> would allow precisely that...observing someone elses activity (just
>> that activity...not full screen sharing, which we might support by
>> adding a "watch" action to XO icons themselves, as well). I envisioned

To clarify this, I don't mean to add code/changes to every activity. I
meant instead that we should build this "watch" functionality into
Sugar directly, and then add the ability to invoke it on any XO or
activity icon that appears in the neighborhood view. In this manner
the teacher would, for instance, start an activity, share it with the
neighborhood, and then instruct all the children to "watch" that
activity (instead of joining it). Each child would then have a view of
the teacher's activity.

- Eben

>> making a composite icon for a "watch" session which wrapped the
>> activity icon in an icon representing the screen, and logging that
>> session in the Journal like any other activity. Finally, I envision
>> the watcher to have the ability to grab screenshots (or perhaps video
>> segments?) of the presentation, such that the resulting Journal entry
>> serves as a record of what they watched.
>>
>> Eben
>>
>>> made a prototype of something like this. It would be an excellent GSoC
>>> project to take this prototype and get it closer to where it could be a part
>>> of sugar for all activities. Just how close you think you can get it, is
>>> something you'd have to research - perhaps with the help of IRC.
>>>
>>> If you can come up with the beginnings of a workable proposal for this, and
>>> get it submitted before the deadline, you definitely deserve to be on our
>>> GSoC team! Get busy...
>>>
>>> Jameson
>>>
>>> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Geza Kovacs <gkovacs at mit.edu> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I am proposing a Multimedia Broadcasting activity for GSoC 2009, and
>>>> would appreciate any feedback or potential mentors. The idea is
>>>> described at:
>>>>
>>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Multimedia-broadcasting
>>>>
>>>> This proposal is somewhat a variation on the standard audio-video
>>>> chatting concept; rather than having students audio-video chat
>>>> one-on-one, which would be redundant in a classroom where the person is
>>>> physically nearby, I believe broadcasting audio and video streams
>>>> displaying presentations or live experiments locally to the masses via
>>>> streaming on their laptops, thereby replacing the need to use
>>>> projectors, would be a good usage of the available video and audio
>>>> capture sources, in a classroom setting. For full details please read
>>>> the proposal.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Geza
>>>>
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>>>
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>>
>