Underwater Webcast

As part of our Sea Trials in Barbados, we held an Underwater Webcast in which we transmitted live image data and robot telemetry to a class at St. George's High School back in Montreal. We did this Jan 21st, 2009. This was accompanied by live streaming audio and video that I narrated from the beach. My colleague Ioannis Rekleitis operated the Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) interface that was used to collect the telemetry data. Junaed Sattar sat in at the High School and gave an associated seminar that also served as a backup in case our Internet connection failed (it didn't, but it did have to be restarted a couple of times).

On the beach, in addition to providing narration for the experiment, I also did some question answering so it was a truly interactive webcast event. I also used the camera embedded in my laptop to provide a live video feed from the surface of what was going on. Thus, we had a webcast that involved live footage from both the surface and from underwater. To my knowledge, this is the first live interactive underwater webcast.