This project is a continuation of the 5 year cooperative agreement funded under grant number NNX14AQ29A. Per the request of kennedy space center, the objective for 2015 is to develop an initial…

This federal contract award with ID NNX15AV40A is a continuation of a 5-year cooperative agreement originally funded under grant number NNX14AQ29A. The objective is to develop an initial version of TABLETOP, an advanced multimedia communication system, to demonstrate its capabilities for future space launch operations at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The $499,999.99 award to the University of Central Florida (UCF) Office of Research will fund enhancements to make TABLETOP more user-friendly and robust for production use, add new capabilities, and extend the system design to support high availability. The TABLETOP system, which exceeds the capabilities of commercial video conferencing products, will significantly improve efficiency and safety of space launch management at KSC through features like real-time video, document collaboration, and freehand sketching. This work is part of UCF's broader expertise in providing research, development, and technical services to federal agencies like NASA across a range of disciplines.

This project is a continuation of the 5 year cooperative agreement funded under grant number NNX14AQ29A. Per the request of kennedy space center, the objective for 2015 is to develop an initial version of tabletop, an advanced multimedia communication system, to demonstrate its significance to future space launch operations. This prototype system has been demonstrated to the management and technical leaders at KSC and the response has been very positive. Our project manager and many others have informed US that the system far exceeded their expectations. With an operational system, IT is now clear that tabletop is a substantial advancement over the OIS (operational and intercom system) and its new generation, move (mission operations voice equipment). While OIS, move, and EVS (extended voice system) are limited to voice communication, tabletop allows video chat and provides a virtual table with multimedia capabilities to facilitate interactive and engaging meetings. If any user drags and drops a video file onto this table, every user in the meeting can see the video rendering and interact with IT (e.g., pausing the video) in real time. If someone shares a PDF file, the whole team can discuss and annotate the document together. A picture is worth a thousand words. A user may also draw and do freehand writing or illustration. Other members can see the sketch in real time as the idea is being visually illustrated on the canvas. During a meeting, a user may also save any object currently on the table to a local folder for future references. The tabletop technology is beyond the capability of todays commercial video conferencing products. Its novel multimedia features will take space launch management to the next level and significantly improve efficiency and safety. IT is also obvious that tabletop can support other agency wide meeting applications ranging from management meetings, contracts management, education and training, to engineering collaboration. Based upon the anticipated impact of tabletop and a history of successes by the UCF software development team, KSC has decided to expand the current research agenda to include research and development pertaining to deploying this novel multimedia communication technology in a production environment. With this ambitious goal, the work planned for 2016 is much more diverse and intensive with specific tasks to 1 make the existing features more user friendly and more robust for production use, 2 add additional capabilities to further improve the usefulness of the system, and 3 extend the system design to support high availability. Extensive stress tests will also be performed to ensure sustainable space launch operations. The deliverable is a tabletop system ready for the KSC deployment team to configure and test production environments in 2017.