The Internet2 project was created with the primary purpose of enabling the development of a new generation of network applications in support of scientific research, distance education, environmental monitoring, health care, and digital libraries. Faculty want to greatly expand current distance learning capabilities to students both within Iowa and throughout the world. This will enable faculty and students at The University of Iowa to access video servers as needed and also to provide materials, such as foreign language motion pictures at The University of Iowa, to classes elsewhere. It is desirable for students to be able to interact with these network-based materials as if they were on their own desktop videodisk. The most common example of this is using a distant supercomputer to create a large amount of data, visualizing the data as it's created, and interacting with the images.
Current networks are too clogged for the transfer of very large data sets.
Similar collaboration in viewing and editing video in real-time is needed in communications and other creative fields. ImmersaDesks were obtained by Geography and ITS for environmental visualization and geographic exploration, including network-based collaborative applications.