The "father" of LoLa wins the GÉANT Community Award 2017
During the TNC17 Networking Conference, from May 29 to June 2 in Linz (Austria), the Community Awards 2017 were awarded, a sign of recognition for those who encouraged collaboration within the community of research and education networks, thus contributing to its growth.
This year Massimo Parovel of the Tartini Conservatory of Trieste was rewarded for the idea that led to the development of the low latency audio-visual system known as LOLA.
In 2005, during a GARR conference, Parovel shared the idea that performing artists should be able to interact in a natural way even if located thousands of km apart, using the high-quality and very large bandwidth connectivity offered by research and education networks.
This idea grew into a project, supported by the Tartini Conservatory of Music and by GARR in Italy, that resulted in the low latency audio-visual system known as LoLa, which allows real-time, real-time collaboration, almost obliterating network-related latency and providing maximum signal quality (without compression) thus allowing remote real-time artistic collaborations.
Now available anywhere in the world, the LoLa system has since been used for training purposes, masterclasses, concerts and spectacular networked performances with musicians, dancers and actors. And LoLa will be a fundamental part of the performance of music and dance show that connects 6 countries at the same time, and will be held on June 1st at Linz TNC17 conference.
LoLa, born to realize art and music performances in real time, has also proven to be a solution to many other needs in different fields such as for high resolution master classes in the medical sector.
"LoLa became possible – Parovel says – thanks to the lucky combination of three factors: a simple but ambitious idea; a group of open minded experts with whom I shared this ambitious idea to turn it into a viable project; an adequate technology underneath.
Without this technology – which we all create and share in this conference – LoLa would have remained a dream.
And the very first idea of LoLa would never have blossomed without my personal combination of passion and interests in different disciplines, from music to technology to science... a passion shared also by my unique fellows in this adventure: the team of experts who believed in my idea and made it real: Paolo Pachini, Carlo Drioli, Nicola Buso and Stefano Bonetti from Music Conservatory Tartini and Enzo Valente, Claudio Allocchio and the whole GARR staff, who supported the idea I shared with them."
"LoLa is a dream of 10 years ago that came true. It started from an idea that at first seemed crazy: to have musicians playing together while being located in different places" comments Claudio Allocchio, senior GARR service manager. “We at GARR accepted the challenge and after 5 years of work we managed to get the system that today the whole world knows. The result comes from a continuous research that led us to improve performances over the time: we started from broadcasting black and white videos in order to be able to broadcast in full HD and with the right equipment even over 4K ".
In addition to Parovel, two additional prices were awarded during TNC17: Hannah Short (CERN), for the contribution to the REFEDS and AARS projects, and Tomasz Wolniewicz and Maja Górecka-Wolniewicz ( Nicolaus Copernicus University Toruń / PSNC) for contributing to various activities including eduGAIN and eduroam.
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