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There has been an ongoing activity largely under the auspices of the US DARPA, in piloting large-scale conferencing with workstations based on LBL's Visual Audio Tool (VAT) [18]. The work has involved many groups, but has been centred in Van Jacobson's group at UC Berkley. This has concentrated on two areas: one is interactive voice conferencing assisted by low definition video using software Codecs; the other is the large scale broadcast of proceedings of meetings, with limited interactive feedback - mainly voice. The system is based on the use of multicast in the Internet [16], and incorporates specific coding schemes from a number of groups. For example, there are versions of video coding from both Xerox Park and INRIA [1], and voice coding from SICS and CWI. The VAT system is not the only one in which these subsystems are used, but it is the most widely distributed. It is the INRIA subsystem which we use as one of the basic services in MICE.
This activity has used the US Internet and its international links mentioned in Section 4. This includes the Internet pipes, the EBONE network, JANET and NORDUNET. These will all be used in the MICE project. We are using the VAT system for conference coordination while building up the general MICE facilities.