Open Video Chat for OLPC/Sugar

A Free and Open Source Deaf Education Initiative S. Jacobs, J. DeCausemaker, J. Lewis, T. Rose, F. Rogers

Rochester Institute of Technology, Lab for Technological Literacy

One Laptop per Child• Mission Statement: To create educational

opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

The XO Laptop, produced and distributed by OLPC

Sugar Labs Sugar Labs Home Page: http://www.sugarlabs.org/

Free and Open Source

• What?• Free and Open Source … is liberally licensed to grant

the right of users to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code and or design.

• Free to use, modify, etc though you may have to buy it.

• FLOS. L=Libre, liberated as opposed to without cost/purchase to own

HFOSS

Project emerged from Humanitarian Development Class

• Class had run three quarters• Numerous Educational Game Projects• Some Network Utility Projects• Some student Co-Ops had emerged from

previous classes• Demonstration of XOs piqued interest of NTID

Center on Access Technology and PEN-International

Development Team• Faculty Mentor• Alumni project manager • Three Co-Op Students. Two of whom had taken

the OLPC/Sugar course. • ASL Instructor Doaney Oatman. Though the team

was all hearing (no Deaf students applied for the Co-Op positions) The project manager arranged for weekly sessions with Doaney on his own initiative

Open Video Chat (OVC)

OLPC is a Limited Platform

• The XO 1.5 has – 1 GHz CPU– 1 Gigabyte of 400MHz RAM – a separate companion chip for peripheral I/O– a 640 x 480 resolution, 30fps camera who’s base

performance is greater than the hardware and software can stream.

How it works

Status as of paper publication

• OVC available for download from Sugar Labs and OLPC as a prototype release (as opposed to a finished product) and had been downloaded over 1300 times

• The development team collected feedback sent from downloads and collected from informal user tests at NTID

Current Status

• Current XO owners can download, and experiment, with the current build of OVC.

• Your symposium RAM sticks are equipped with Sugar on a Stick, a version of the system that your home computer can auto boot and let you play with Sugar. If you have camera hardware and software recognized by OVC, you can try it on your home machines.

Current/Future Work

• The team is in the early research stages of creating Open Access Video Chat, an improved version of OVC that will run on Mac Windows and Linux boxes and offer a wider range of capabilities due to the more powerful hardware in those machines

Questions?