NTT Equipment Arrives

In December of 1998 three engineers from Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT) in Japan arrived at the ACT office with several large crates of equipment. Over the next several days they unpacked and installed several computers and established the network links required to connect the system to their offices in Japan. The centerpiece of their system is a 28 inch extremely high resolution (SHD) display. The other equipment includes a Sun network server and another Sun workstation which operates the SHD display. There is also a PC that is used as the user workstation to access the system.

NTT Equipment Deployed at ACT Offices

The NTT system includes a software package called the Digital Library, developed by NTT, which makes use of the SHD monitor for display purposes. Images on the large monitor are quite spectacular. The system currently only supports Photo-CD images but this is of interest to us because many of the images in the World Heritage Exchange are in that format.

With the assistance of the NTT technical staff, we were able to make modifications to the Cinemage system to display images from the World Heritage Exchange on the SHD monitor. An example is shown below.

WHE image on SHD 28" monitor
(standard 17" PC monitor to the right)

Over the coming months it is expected that more formal project plans will be developed between ACT and NTT. These may include such activities as more work in development of high speed networking links and the adaptation of the SHD monitor to support other image formats.