As a founding member of the Internet2 Consortium, Penn has always been at the forefront of participation in the research and education networking global community. Faculty, staff, and students at the University of Pennsylvania leverage the power of MAGPI and Internet2 in new and exciting ways in the lab and in the classroom.

Digital Corinth

Expanding access to antiquity

The ancient city of Corinth, Greece has been excavated since 1895, creating a vast accumulation of information that is being digitized. The Digital Corinth Project teams at the University of Pennsylvania and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens are designing a unique system for tagging of digital components and the creation of tools and lesson plans that draw on the data to present learning opportunities on the architecture, city planning, social and religious life of the city of Corinth during the Roman occupation in 44 BC. Students and teachers from around the world will be able to utilize these learning resources and opportunities without ever leaving their classrooms.

TeleImmersion

Tele-immersion is a communication medium trying to create the illusion that users at geographically dispersed places share the same physical space possibly augmented by virtual components. Tele-immersion is the ultimate synthesis of computer vision, networking, and graphics. It requires the real-time scanning of a scene, its transmission with minimal latency, and its immersive rendering at a remote site. The focus of research at the University of Pennsylvania is the study and development of systems that can scan wide-area dynamic scenes and create 3D view-independent representations. Tele-Immersion will enable users at geographically distributed sites to collaborate in real time in a shared, simulated environment as if they were in the same physical room. It is the ultimate synthesis of networking and media technologies to enhance collaborative environments.

The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image at The University of Pennsylvania

Re-envisioning scholarly research through digitization

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries have made over 12,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music are available over the network through the Schoenberg  Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI). Since 1996, SCETI has been enhancing the research and scholarly use of rare books, manuscripts and other primary source materials by making them easily accessible to the worldwide community. They create archive-quality digital facsimiles and make them available online through web sites tailored to the each individual collection. Several of their projects are collaborations between the University of Pennsylvania Library and other libraries, museums and private collections.