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1. IRMOS: Immersing Learners in Learning
by Bob Little
Introduction
The Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Orientated Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project is a 36 month,
12.9m Euro project awarded by the European Commission to a Consortium of 13 leading European organizations.
The idea behind the IRMOS Project is that today’s Service Orientated Infrastructures (SOIs) lack real-time (RT) capa-
bilities. Basically:
• SOIs are not dynamically configurable and adaptable to RT requirements.
• Timing and interaction issues are not studied thoroughly and formally expressed in SOIs.
• Web services lack RT capabilities.
• Network awareness and control login tend not to be integrated into the application services login.
IRMOS is partially funded by the EC Seventh Framework Program FP7/2007-2011 under grant agreement number
214777 (http://www.irmosproject.eu).
IRMOS aims to use grid and cloud computing to provide the computing resources to bring learners together in both
the real and virtual worlds. The 13 organizations collaborating on the IRMOS Project aim to design, develop and
validate an SOI which will allow the adoption of interactive real-time applications - especially multimedia applications
- enabling their rich set of attributes (from time-constrained operation to dynamic service control and adaptation) and
their efficient integration into the infrastructure. The overriding objective of IRMOS is to enable RT interaction between
people and applications over an SOI, where processing, storage and networking needs to be combined and delivered
with guaranteed levels of service.
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2. IRMOS: Immersing Learners in Learning
The project is coordinated by Stuart Smithson of Xyratex Ltd, of Havant near Portsmouth and the technical coordinator is Profes-
sor Dimosthenis Kyriazis, of the Institute of Communication & Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens.
The project’s partners comprise: Xyratex International Ltd and the University of Southampton (both UK); the Institute of Com-
munication & Computer Systems – National Technical University of Athens (Greece); Stiftelsen Sintef (Norway); Telefonica I+D
(Spain); Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and eXact learning solutions (Italy); Alcatel-Lucent Deutschland AG, Universität Stuttgart,
DFT Digital Film Technology GmbH and Deutsche Thomson OHG (all Germany).
The eLearning scenario within IRMOS relates to ‘extended geo-learning’, delivered ‘in-class’, ‘in-house’, ‘in campus and ‘in
building’ on an urban, suburban and global GPS basis. eXact learning solutions is also working on ‘learner positioning’ in virtual
worlds as well as in the real world. Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of eXact learning solutions, commented: “And, of course, the learning
content produced can be re-used and distributed via different delivery media – such as text books, web-based learning materi-
als, mobile learning, digital boards and so on.”
Using the IRMOS-empowered set-up, learners will be able to meet in specific real world learning hubs, such as art galleries,
tourist attractions, schools and/or industrial locations, and receive location-based learning materials and community services,
geo-located and allied to relevance and context awareness.
IRMOS Innovations
Among the innovations that the IRMOS Project aims to develop are:
• A platform of services that enables RT interaction between people and applications.
• An integrated optimization approach at various levels from inter-organization business processes to intelligent networking and vir-
tualization techniques that enable RT interaction and concurrency at all points of value chains that span organizational boundaries.
• Software tools and associated modeling environments to enable RT interactive applications to be written to target the IRMOS
framework.
• Specification languages that unify various parameters and characteristics used to describe real-time applications on SOIs, and
allow value chain participants to collaborate in the design, deployment and execution of networks of services.
According to the organizations involved in the Project, IRMOS will:
• Advance the business models of real-time applications with the benefits that come from service orientated architectures (SOAs).
• Increase the competitiveness of those using IRMOS due to low cost implementation and broader market accessibility.
• Lower the entry level for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to participate in the market of RT interactive services,
such as multimedia processing.
• Strengthen the efficiency and productivity of organizations by advancing the resilience of SOIs.
• Work on standardization and extend the state of the art.
• Provide tools to write software with predictable performance and which are resilient to the changes of SOI environments.
Initially, the IRMOS Project has applications in three areas: collaborative digital film production; virtual and augmented reality,
and interactive collaborative eLearning.
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3. IRMOS: Immersing Learners in Learning
Application: IRMOS in Film Production
A group of artists, colorists, editors, VFX and sound operators, located in different countries are jointly working during the hot
phase of post-production of an international Sci-Fi movie co-production. Early in the morning they log into the IRMOS platform to
jointly review the previous day’s work and to prepare today’s work together with the director and the producer. The system auto-
matically configures their GUI according to their personal capabilities and expectations, to create a collaborative environment in
which they are also able to use the multimedia capabilities it offers in order to communicate with each other.
They start the visualization of the already edited film in a synchronized way. In other words, the application using the IRMOS
platform provides multiple streams of the same content to the group in order to discuss the different effects or changes to be
applied. When needed, the streaming can be stopped, the changes discussed with the others and, after performing the corre-
sponding adjustments, replay the edited sequence immediately, so everybody can agree to the final impression.
The system processes these changes in real time using the processing power in the IRMOS enabled computing networked com-
puter cluster so that, at the end of the process, the group gets a good impression of the result. This collaborative approach with
distributed teams drastically reduces the time needed for production and, so, lowers the total costs.
Application: IRMOS in Learning
Anna is one of a large group of Spanish students visiting Athens as part of a school trip. They are learning about classical
Greece and, before their visit, they have already experienced an interactive, real time virtual course on ancient Greek archi-
tecture. While visiting the Acropolis, Anna accesses the eLearning application again and indicates the topics in which she is
interested.
The application, running on an IRMOS-enabled platform, considers her device’s capabilities and the kind of services she
needs. It then constructs a virtual reality learning environment around which Anna can move - with her fellow students. She
is be able to interact with the learning material by accessing real time multimedia content, using video streaming and seeing
a visualization of how the Acropolis used to look.
The virtual environment allows access to information from other locations. For example, Anna can access the National Mu-
seum of Athens to gain further information on artifacts found at the Acropolis and to interact with other members of her class
who are visiting the museum at the same time. After the visit, all the students gather in a nearby hotel, where they are stay-
ing, and ask to videoconference with an expert on classic Greek architecture - to have a deeper explanation on the history of
the Parthenon and discuss what they have learnt collectively during the day. IRMOS allows them to videoconference with a
curator on duty at the site who also delivers some multimedia material for supporting his explanation.
This enables a large number of people with a need for synchronization of experience to interact with one another through a
virtual environment. It also allows RT delivery of multi-media material to users with adaptation of the service rates, based on
the users’ ability to consume the delivered data rate and on the number of simultaneous users of the system. Furthermore,
the system provides the automated selection of the best source of material for delivery to the user and automated construc-
tion of the service over the network.
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4. IRMOS: Immersing Learners in Learning
Historical Context
Setting the IRMOS Project in the context of the historical development of eLearning, Fabrizio Cardinali, chief executive officer
of eXact learning solutions – one of the 13 organizations collaborating on the IRMOS Project - commented: “First generation
eLearning offered little more than electronic page-turning and so didn’t provide much competition for classroom-delivered learn-
ing. Second generation eLearning began to meet the needs of learners who were looking for informal, self-generated learning
opportunities, while the new – third – generation of eLearning materials are addressing blended learning issues, with ubiquitous,
open service learning being delivered in a variety of ways via mobile devices and even virtually.
“Today, we’re not thinking about ‘eLearning platforms’ but, rather, about an ecosystem which knows – or discovers – who the
learner is, what language s/he speaks, the learner’s background, learning delivery preferences and so on,” he continued. “This
is giving rise to a new generation of distributed and federated learning content access standards. These standards are helping to
produce true personalized learning – at least, they are doing so in our research laboratories.”
These standards are important because, while first generation eLearning locked content to the hardware system that ran it,
standardization has produced ‘open’, plug and play learning solutions through services oriented architectures (SOAs). An exam-
ple of an SOA is the OKI initiative, which breaks eLearning into single components which allow learners to pick and choose the
elements of their own learning ecosystem. This is also helping to lower the cost of producing these components and, thus, the
systems they inhabit.
“These days, you don’t need to produce every part of the system – because, thanks to international standards, we have distrib-
uted and interoperable stakeholders and services,” Cardinali said. “These stakeholders include service brokers, service providers
and service consumers. So, we now have web service implementation empowering a new generation digital learning content
networks and marketplaces.”
Marrying the Real & Virtual Worlds
Within the IRMOS Project, eXact learning solutions studied both open and non-open source systems and is developing a user
scenario for interactive real-time location based learning, integrating eXact Mobile learning technologies with the Open Wonder-
land Virtual Worlds and collaboration platforms, running on top of the IRMOS service oriented infrastructure (SOI) infrastructure.
All IRMOS public deliverables are available in http://www.irmosproject.eu/deliverables/
About the Author
For over 20 years, Bob Little has specialised in writing about, and commentating on, corporate learning – especially eLearning – and technology-related
subjects. His work has been published in the UK, Continental Europe, the USA and Australia
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