The University of Illinois, birthplace of Mosaic, has followed up its most famous offspring with a sibling. Vosaic – or Video Mosaic – is a joint effort with a Chicago firm and enab-les high-quality video stream-ing with em-bedded hyperlinks, reports our new sister paper, Online Reporter. Developed by the systems research group of the university’s vaunted computer sciences department and marketed by Digital Video Communications Inc, Vosaic integrates video and audio into HyperText Mark-up Language so they are no longer considered external data types. It enables, for example, embedded hyperlinks within the video stream so that moving objects are clickable and lead to other documents. Audio files can be used as background music. Its streaming capability enables users to view arbitrarily large files, regardless of how much disk space is available, and play-on-demand specific segments of the video by frame level or playing time. As well as standard UDP network proto-cols, Vosaic runs on top of a new protocol, Video Datagram Protocol, which adapts to client-side CPU and bandwidth conditions. It delivers most video and audio standards to the desk-top. At two to three frames per second on a 28.8Kbps modem in demonstrations at Comdex, however, it still requires some fine-tuning to be a low-bandwidth system. Vos-aic will come to market as a plug-in for Netscape and Spyglass browsers.
