Fig.1
Do you know about Ryuichi Sakamoto's opera called "LIFE" that was performed last September? The opera "LIFE" was planned, composed and conducted by Ryuichi Sakamoto, and was performed in Osaka on the 4th and 5th, and in Tokyo on the 9th to 12th of September, 1999. The opera attracted attention because various innovations were introduced. For details, see: http://www.asahi.com/opera/index.html
Planned as an opera performance with the connection of various locations in the world, as one of its new attempts, this opera was produced to use the Internet to allow people not only in the closed space inside the concert hall but also in a remote area outside the hall to share the same space and to interact with the environment. To achieve this, technology for transmitting a large amount of speech and image data at high speed with stability was required.
In response to a request for technological cooperation from professor Jun Murai of Keio University, the RWCP Parallel and Distributed Systems Fujitsu Laboratory provided technical support for the world's first attempt to broadcast an opera via the Internet through the delivery of video images and music, connecting Tokyo, New York and Frankfurt. Details of the technological cooperation provided by the Parallel and Distributed Systems Fujitsu Laboratory are given below.
We received a request for technological cooperation to use the research results of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Fujitsu Laboratory in the opera "LIFE" composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto scheduled to be performed in September, 1999. The contents of the request were as follows.
The Comet prototype system developed by this laboratory delivers music and imag es to compose the opera using the Internet among the three locations of Tokyo, New York and Frankfurt. The system uses a technology called Comet DV/IP that delivers digital video images (DV: Digital Video) through the Internet (IP: Internet Protocol) (Fig. 1). It is not merely a relay broadcast but the world's first attempt at composing an opera itself using DV/IP technology which requires very high quality.
Fig.1
We loaned nine Comet prototype systems (including preliminary machines) and provided necessary technical support.
In this laboratory we are conducting researches on faster communications protocol processing in order to achieve parallel and distributed processing that uses a wide-area network (http://www.pds-flab.rwcp.or.jp/).
The prototype system Comet developed in this laboratory is characterized by high-speed execution of communication protocol processing by a protocol processing processor installed in a network adapter and easily achieves processing that requires high-speed such as DV/IP (Fig. 2).
Fig.2
Comet DV/IP is an application system prototyped for the first time in the world in March, 1998 for verifying the high-speed protocol processing technology of Comet. It has been accumulating operational achievements in experiments and exhibitions over a wide-area Internet such as at SC98 (http://www.supercomp.org/sc98), WIDE Project (http://www.wide.ad.jp/) working group and INTEROP 98 Tokyo (http://interop.zdnet.co.jp/). Comet DV/IP is a system that can provide communications quality and stability in operation that can be used in practical applications through the improvement made possible by the feedback provided from these experiments.
Comet DV/IP offers the following functions other than the IP encapsulation of DV packets:
For details of these technologies, refer to: (http://www.rwcp.or.jp/press-release/LIFE/)
The LIFE performance was broadcast at the end of the year as a special program on the stations affiliated with TV-Asahi. For further details, watch the above program and visit the LIFE's web site (http://www.asahi.com/opera/index.html).