Thursday, July 5, 2001

High-Definition Television Could Change Telecourses and Online Learning By FLORENCE OLSEN Within a few years, specialized telecourses that make use of high-definition television, or HDTV, will be delivered over high-speed networks like Internet2. But some institutions whose students could benefit from advanced television technology may not have the network capacity to receive the courses. Network and video experts say that because of expensive equipment and network costs, such courses will be limited, at least initially, to a few high-demand areas, such as medicine and electrical and computer engineering. The finely detailed images possible with HDTV would not be necessary for every telecourse. What's more, the technical experts say, only students at universities that can provide substantial amounts of bandwidth will benefit from HDTV courses with interactive components. Those courses will rely on a network-intensive technology known as "HDTV over IP," where "IP" stands for Internet Protocol. "HDTV over IP is going to be a tough sell," says Brian Chee, associate director of the advanced-network-computing laboratory at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. "The bulk of people that really, really, really want distance learning and so forth, from home or school, can't afford the infrastructure for HDTV over IP," he says. Creating the Infrastructure Such pessimism, however, isn't entirely justified, says Steven Corbato, director of backbone-network infrastructure for Internet2. In parts of Washington State, for instance, county governments are working aggressively to build a fiber-optic infrastructure that could deliver high-definition-television courses to people's homes, he says. Researchers are still exploring the potential of HDTV-over-IP networks, which may permit medical students, at a distance of a few hundred feet or even several thousand miles, to observe new surgical procedures and ask questions of the surgeons. The University of Washington, which has been a center for much of the research, is collaborating with other universities "that easily have the network bandwidth and engineering expertise to take advantage of this," says Amy Philipson, executive director of the ResearchChannel. It is a consortium, led by the University of Washington, that uses television to publicize university and government research. The university has conducted several HDTV-over-IP demonstrations over Abilene, the Internet2 backbone network, including a video transfer of 200 million bits per second between Seattle and Palo Alto, Calif. The image fidelity of HDTV over IP is such that "you can see light on a single hair," says Ms. Philipson. Using HDTV for a classroom videoconference over Internet2, "it looks as if you're looking through a pane of glass to another room," and teaching materials or procedures can be demonstrated with razor sharpness, says Hawaii's Mr. Chee. The Internet2 demonstrations helped the network engineers recognize the importance of involving video producers, says David Richardson, manager of the ResearchChannel's HDTV-over-IP project. "HDTV has the potential for very rich color, rich sound, and high-fidelity imagery. But if you don't have people who know how to do good lighting, work the camera, and set up the mikes, you'll still wind up with bad video." High-definition television comes in different grades, depending on how much its signal has to be compressed before it can be delivered and displayed on a standard computer monitor, video wall, or plasma screen. Uncompressed, an HDTV signal carries 1.5 billion bits per second and requires a very high-capacity network. At least one company, 2netFX of San Jose, Calif., sells the software and hardware for displaying highly compressed HDTV signals that a top-of-the-line Ethernet campus network could carry to students' computers in their dormitory rooms. Some experts say the preferred option for delivering HDTV on a campus is to increase the capacity of the campus IP network, which itself can cost thousands of dollars. But even that option is beyond the reach of many community colleges and other institutions. And the price of HDTV-production equipment, says Mr. Chee, is "a king's ransom." Rich universities, many of them members of the research consortium at Washington, are experimenting with HDTV productions. Washington, for instance, is working with HDTV over everything -- IP, broadcast, cable, and satellite networks. Its new surgery pavilion will have HDTV throughout the building. Technology Overkill? For Henry Comby, who for years has used television to help teach courses in cultural anthropology and sociology, HDTV seems like overkill. The anthropology telecourse, for instance, consists largely of ethnographic films that are old, and "the quality is not that great anyway," says Mr. Comby, an assistant professor at Tulsa Community College. At several hundred thousand dollars, the cost to outfit a basic HDTV-production studio has remained high because the broadcast-television industry, the largest market for HDTV, has been reluctant to buy the new digital technology, Ms. Philipson says. Filmmakers were the first industry group to show real interest in HDTV, she says, and now research universities are following. But equipment prices may not fall significantly until 2006, when the federal government will require that television stations broadcast only HDTV signals. Meanwhile, some university researchers are letting their imaginations run wild in considering the potential uses in medical education for interactive HDTV. Even projecting a high-resolution CAT scan onto a patient's body to guide a surgeon no longer seems impractical. "We start to think about things differently than we ever thought about them before," Ms. Philipson says. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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