\mysection{Showcase Development}

Showcase development corresponds to Workpackage~3, lead by AETHRA, in the
European proposal.  There will be two showcases --- a tourism showcase in
Month~14 and a help desk showcase in Month~30.  Both showcases will involve a
customer and a service provider negotiating via multimodal communication.  The
following tasks are involved in showcase development:

{\bf Set-up, testing and validation of the hardware and software platform
supports:} The communication network will be based on Internet or
Intranet. All the data related to human-to-human communication, speech,
pointing gestures and video conference will be transmitted using standard
protocols. Speech and gestures will be encoded using de facto standards that
are now emerging, mainly based on the XML family, for example, SMIL or similar
future developments.

{\sc Nespole!} will explore the suitability of a general system architecture
based on terminals for the users (PCs) connected via IP to a server. The
terminal will have the tasks of: inputting speech, images and gestures;
encoding and sending them to the server; and outputting the same information
when coming from the server. The server will provide all the relevant STST
services, the multimedia data related to the application domain, and the
multimodality functionalities.

%% In order to support the required multimedia features, both the
%% provider and the customer will be given terminals which support some kind
%% of multimedia integration language, e.g., SMIL. The terminals communicate
%% with a central server by sending/receiving SMIL strings. The central server
%% is responsible for all the functionalities of STST and
%% multimedia/multimodality handling. The terminals are only required to be
%% capable of interpreting and producing SMIL representations encoding the
%% relevant properties.

{\bf Integration of the STST, multimedia and multimodal functionalities:} Our
scenarios integrate visual cues and images with multilingual speech.  The two
parties will interact with the system by acting on a ``whiteboard'', though,
for reasons explained in Section~\ref{multimodal}, this will not be configured
as a real shared space.

%% Thus, the provider might want to be able to show
%% the customer images, movies, and graphics, while commenting on them by
%% means of spoken language. In the help desk scenario, a picture, or
%% series thereof, might be used to show the customer the operations
%% he/she has to perform or the technical plan of the equipment, or parts
%% thereof. This also paves the way to the possibility of cross-modal
%% reference, pointing, etc., as discussed in connection with
%% Section~\ref{multimodal}.
