We are additionally developing a knowledge-based system for management and control of network, computing and other resources in a distributed environment to achieve the goal of improving performance, reliability, and concurrency control of groupware applications. This system functions transparently to the user and to the application programmer. The resource request calls are intercepted and the knowledge-based system builds a plan of request fulfillment. In particular the research is quantifying the synergies derivable from the simultaneous combination of sight, sound and touch modalities, making use of individual technologies originated and researched previously by the CAIP Center. A gimbaled video camera computes the position of a cursor in the display corresponding to the gaze direction.
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The Rutgers force-feedback tactile glove enables object manipulation by grasp, manual gesture, and other tactile sensing. The multimodal interface integrates these inputs in a software fusion agent which uses the sensory input to estimate user intent. Several researchers around the world downloaded the system and are currently testing it. The bus spans network fabrics and provides a virtual interconnect for geographically distributed clients. It achieves synchronous collaboration through real-time event delivery, event ordering and concurrency control.