Remote Display Technology Research Articles

Audio–Visual Emotion-Aware Cloud Gaming Framework

The promising potential and emerging applications of cloud gaming have drawn increasing interest from academia, industry, and the general public. However, providing a high-quality gaming experience in the cloud gaming framework is a challenging task because of the tradeoff between resource consumption and player emotion, which is affected by the game screen. We tackle this problem by leveraging emotion-aware screen effects in the cloud gaming framework and combining them with remote display technology. The first stage in the framework is the learning or training stage, which establishes a relationship between screen features and emotions using Gaussian mixture model-based classifiers. In the operating stage, a linear programming model provides appropriate screen changes based on the real-time user emotion obtained in the first stage. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The results show that our proposed framework can provide a high quality gaming experience while generating an acceptable amount of workload for the cloud server in terms of resource consumption.

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4---6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE.

CyberLiveApp: A secure sharing and migration approach for live virtual desktop applications in a cloud environment

In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid advent of cloud computing, in which remote software is delivered as a service and accessed by users using a thin client over the Internet. In particular, a traditional desktop application can execute in the remote virtual machines of clouds without re-architecture and provide a personal desktop experience to users through remote display technologies. However, existing cloud desktop applications have isolated environments with virtual machines (VMs), which cannot adequately support application-oriented collaborations between multiple users and VMs. In this paper, we propose a flexible collaboration approach, named CyberLiveApp, to enable live virtual desktop application sharing, based on a cloud and virtualization infrastructure. CyberLiveApp supports secure application sharing and on-demand migration among multiple users or equipment. To support VM desktop sharing among multiple users, we develop a secure access mechanism to distinguish their view privileges, in which window operation events are tracked to compute hidden areas of windows in real time. A proxy-based window filtering mechanism is also proposed to deliver desktops to different users. To achieve the goals of live application sharing and migration between VMs, a presentation redirection approach based on VNC protocol and a VM cloning service based on the Libvirt interface are used. These approaches have been preliminary evaluated on an extended MetaVNC. Results of evaluations have verified that these approaches are effective and useful.

Killer whale habitat use and prey fields from remote hydrophones and echosounders.

The Salish Sea Hydrophone Network has been providing live audio streams to listeners around the globe for the past three years. Five hydrophones around the core summer habitat of the endangered southern resident killer whales allow detection of killer whale presence and inference of pod identity based on call associations. Detection of calls, whistles, and clicks is accomplished automatically by spectral and time domain analysis and manually by a global network of trained human listeners. The hydrophone network is more effective than a sighting network for detecting killer whales during inclement weather and at night, and for generating real‐time notifications to alert researchers and managers. Additionally, the live streams and archived recordings have enriched educational activities of local museums and aquariums. In 2008, the hydrophone at Lime Kiln State Park was supplemented by hydroacoustic surveys conducted using a Biosonics echosounder (200 kHz). From August through December the echosounder was deployed at 15 m depth to conduct a continuous, fixed, horizontal survey. Remote display technology was used to monitor the echosounder in real time while also listening to the live audio stream. The resultant time series of fish density and acoustic behavior of killer whales is presented.

Experiences teaching operating systems using virtual platforms and Linux

Operating system courses teach students much more when they provide hands-on kernel-level project experience with a real operating system. However, enabling a large class of students to do kernel development can be difficult. To address this problem, we created a virtual kernel development environment in which operating systems can be developed, debugged, and rebooted in a shared computer facility without affecting other users. Using virtual machines and remote display technology, our virtual kernel development laboratory enables even distance learning students at remote locations to participate in kernel development projects with on-campus students. We have successfully deployed and used our virtual kernel development environment together with the open-source Linux kernel to provide kernel-level project experiences for over nine hundred students in the introductory operating system course at Columbia University.

Experiences teaching operating systems using virtual platforms and linux

Operating system courses teach students much more when they provide hands-on kernel-level project experience with a real operating system. However, enabling a large class of students to do kernel development can be difficult. To address this problem, we created a virtual kernel development environment in which operating systems can be developed, debugged, and rebooted in a shared computer facility without affecting other users. Using virtual machines and remote display technology, our virtual kernel development laboratory enables even distance learning students at remote locations to participate in kernel development projects with on-campus students. We have successfully deployed and used our virtual kernel development environment together with the open-source Linux kernel to provide kernel-level project experiences for over nine hundred students in the introductory operating system course at Columbia University.

Architecture and Environment for Enabling Interactive Grids

Traditional use of grid computing allows a user to submit batch jobs in a grid environment. We believe, next generation grids will extend the application domain to include interactive graphical sessions. We term such grids Interactive Grids. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges involved in building Interactive Grids. These include fine grain access control, performance QoS guarantees, dynamic account management, scheduling, and user data management. We present the key architectural concepts in building Interactive Grids viz. hierarchical sessions, hierarchical admission control, hierarchical agents, classes of dynamic accounts, application profiling, user data management, scheduling for interactive sessions, persistent environment settings, and exporting remote desktop. We also describe IGENV, an environment for enabling interactive grids. IGENV consists of GISH -'Grid Interactive Shell', Controlled Desktop, SAC -'Session Admission Control' module, GMMA -'Grid Monitoring and Management Agents', and Policy Engine. We also present our testbed implementation for Interactive Grids using and extending Globus Toolkit 2.0 for the Grid middleware infrastructure, and VNC as the remote display technology.