26 August 1997

Dr. Andrew S. Patrick (Andrew.Patrick@CRC.doc.ca)

Communications Research Centre

The Need

Multicasting is being used on the Internet to conduct various kinds of interactive sessions. The most common of these are videoconferences that are used for broadcasting programs or events, collaborative work, or entertainment. Our experience and research showed that there is no method available for systematically collecting quality ratings during these sessions. In addition, there is a need to collect and organize participants' opinions on various topics during the course of multicast sessions.

Presently, quality ratings and participant opinions are collected anecdotally, often using a shared whiteboard tool where users scribble their comments. Other methods that are used include e- mail sent to the organizer of the multicast session or attempting to solicit comments from the users during or after the event over the audio channel. These current methods of polling multicast participants are unreliable, incomplete and not quantifiable. Participants often do not use the whiteboard to provide comments, perhaps because they do not know what to comment on. In addition, any comments they do provide may not cover all aspects of the session. Finally, anecdotal comments are very difficult to quantify, which makes comparisons across sessions impossible.

The Solution

The solution is specialized multicasting software that is designed to collect systematic quality ratings and opinions from session participants. This software, called "MPoll", is used alone or with audio, video, and other conferencing software in a multimedia session. MPoll provides a tool for collecting and organizing ratings and opinions from participants that are reliable, complete, and quantifiable. MPoll questions are structured and the results are tabulated and displayed in real- time.

There is no other software available to do systematic polling during multicast sessions. Researchers at SunSoft Inc. have described software that provides some limited audience polling, but this proprietary technology is not available and has not been commercially marketed. Although there is other voting software available, and people have used HTML forms to collect poll information, no other software uses multicasting to collect and distribute the results in real time.

Current Status

The MPoll software has been prototyped and implemented using user- centred design techniques. A graphical user interface has been developed in Tcl/Tk, and a new multicast polling protocol has been defined and implemented in C. Early versions of the MPoll software (Alpha and Beta) have been made available to multicast users for testing and evaluation. MPoll has been used during MERCI collaborative work meetings, and to collect quality ratings during remote seminars.

Commercial Opportunities

Multicasting is an important new Internet protocol for real-time, distributed information transmission and most of the major Internet software vendors are developing multicast applications. The MPoll software is available for licence from CRC. The software can be used in a commercial product that is part of a videoconferencing package or its own in an application that collects opinions. Thus, MPoll is of most interest to software companies that are developing Internet conferencing applications, and polling companies who are interested in collecting opinions in a systematic and efficient manner.