LOLA: Low Latency Audio Visual Streaming System

1. Introduction

Lola is an Audio Visual Streaming System developed by “Conservatorio di Musica G.

Tartini”, Trieste, Italy, in collaboration with GARR, the Italian Academic and Research Network.

LOLA goal is to provide a tool for real-time audio/video “natural” distance human interaction. It was originally conceived for distance music performances, education and production, but can be used for any other scenario where real-time interaction is required. A special attention has been paid to the optimization of the signal processing and transmission in order to keep the system latency as low as possible, below the human delay perception threshold. Both Standard Definition video (SD) and High Definition video (HD) modes are supported from version 1.4.x

The system is based on high performance audio/video acquisition hardware, and on the integration and optimization of audio/video stream acquisition, presentation and transmission. The

LOLA system also requires very high performance Wide Area and Local Area Networks: 1 Gigabit per second end-to-end connection is the minimum suggested configuration when running the system with uncompressed video signals; lower bandwidth can be used when running the LOLA system with video compression on.

NOTE: Lola depends on very specific hardware components and it doesn't work with any kind of camera, frame grabber or audio card; please carefully read the following “Hardware and

Operating System requirements” chapter.

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