The Cambridge, UK-based Olivetti Research Laboratory, funded jointly by Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and Digital Equipment Corp, has been doing a lot of work on the so-called active badge technology – infra-red location devices linked to computer and telephone systems. But more interesting is a parallel project to develop a multi-media desktop environment using Unix workstations equipped with their own charge-coupled device camera, microphone and loudspeaker linked to an Olivetti Research Pandora system. Pandora, a digital system, enables real-time, interactive video, audio, text and graphics to be accessed simultaneously from different terminals. Two or more users can conduct video phone conversations and access live television pictures or send video mail, for instance. The workstations communicate via high-speed Asynchronous Mode Transfer local area networks with 500Mb per-second backbone capacity – 50Mbps distribution to individual workstations – and the work has caught the eye of British Telecommunications Plc, which wants to apply the technology in an ISDN system, initially for financial traders in the City of London (CI No 1,904).
