"This is like an acoustic telescope," Stanford said of
the microphone arrays that detect the location of each voice and
pass it to one of five video cameras. Behind the meeting room is a
data acquisition system running on a Linux cluster of 14 computers
with 400-MHz to 1.2-GHz CPUs.
The cluster has a couple of 1T RAID storage arrays plus three
64-channel data acquisition boards and three eight-channel, 24-bit
audio acquisition boards. Its Gigabit Ethernet network switch is
from 3Com Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif.
The meeting room generates about 1G per minute or 60G per hour
of data from five steerable Sony EVI-D30 videoconferencing cameras
from Sony Corp. of America of Park Ridge, N.J. The arrays contain
about 200 low-cost WM-52 electret microphones from Panasonic
Computer Solutions Co. of Secaucus, N.J.
