How's Your Optiportal?

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optiportal

From academia comes the new word for videowall: optiportal. Calit2 invented this term during their Optiputer Project to create interconnected computing resources over high-bandwidth networks.

Calit2 is one of four California Institutes for Science and Innovation that comes from a partnership between University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego.

Their Optiputer Project goal is to encourage collaboration through the use of optiportals, a goal very dear to the heart of any AV integrator in the corporate world.

Education always prefers free or low cost solutions…and Calit2 researched and collected an important list of enabling software for display walls. In the link below, you can find some middleware options that are used on many optiportals… “all are either free for institutional use or completely opensource”.

Where the university traditionally has focused on education and research, Calit2 goes one step further and includes actual development and deployment of prototype infrastructure for testing new solutions in a real-world context.

Calit2 represents an experiment in inventing the university research environment of the future because it…

  • Builds horizontal links among departments to foster multidisciplinary studies.
  • Creates research teams consisting of members who can be located anywhere because of the Internet.
  • Supports involvement by faculty, students, industry, government, and community partners.
  • Enables prototyping in Calit2 "living laboratories."
  • Provides technical professionals as the bridge between academia and industry.

Go The Optiportal, Free Resources