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Stream from Anywhere with LiveU Solo Pro Connect Kits: Unlimited Data – Videoguys
Join us for this week’s Videoguys Live where we with explore the incredible capabilities of the LiveU Solo Pro Connect Kits! Discover how you can stream high-quality video from anywhere with unlimited data and advanced bonding technology. Whether you’re a content creator, event organizer, or just love live streaming, this show will demonstrate how the LiveU can elevate your streaming experience. Don’t miss out on this game-changing technology!
Watch the full webinar below:
[embedded content]
A portable bonding encoder for future-proof live coverage
Highlights:
- Exceptional Quality: 4K video resolution
- Rock-Solid Reliability: 4 external 4G/5G modems
- Next-Gen Encoding: HEVC encoding
- Limitless Coverage: Capture footage from anywhere
- Video and audio protocol developed over the last decade by LiveU
- It’s not only a point to point, low latency, high resiliency protocol
- Built to accommodate the special properties of cellular and LTE networks
- ”Kits” of Verified Modems
- Pre-installed SIMs, ready to activate
- Unlimited data plans with no commitment
- Start and stop at any time
- “USA” Kits optimized for US data & reliability
- “International” kits can operate all over the world with regional specific pricing & traveler plans
|
|
Kit |
MSRP |
BOM |
Part Number |
Data Plans |
Duo Solo PRO Connect Starter Kit – USA |
$450 |
2x Inseego USB8 2x Sims Getting started card |
LU-SOLO-LRTC-KIT-02 |
USA Only. $295/m |
Quattro Solo PRO Connect Starter Kit w/ Belt Pack – USA |
$995 |
4x Inseego USB8 4x Sims LiveU Solo PRO Belt Pack 2x Y Cables HDMI Extension Cable HDMI Tension Clip Getting started card |
LU-SOLO-KIT-04-BELT |
USA Only $435/M Annual plans $4,350 |
Duo Solo PRO Connect Starter Kit – International |
$450 |
2x LU Net 4G 2x Sims Getting started card |
LU-SOLO-LRTC-KIT-02-EA |
For EU, Canada, and worldwide travelers. |
Quattro Solo PRO Connect Starter Kit w/Belt Pack – International |
$995 |
4x LU Net 4G 4x Sims LiveU Solo PRO Belt Pack 2x Y Cables HDMI Extension Cable HDMI Tension Clip Getting started card |
LU-SOLO-KIT-04-EA-BELT |
For EU, Canada, and worldwide travelers |
Step 1: Buy a Starter Kit
- Select your LiveU Solo Pro Encoder with either HDMI only HDMI and SDI
- Select a Connect Kit (2 modems or 4 modems)
Step 2: Activate Data
- Login to the Solo Portal
- Activate 2 modem plan at $295/month or 4 modem plan at $435/month
- Use solo-videoguys promo code to save 5%
- SoloConnect Pro data plans include unlimited data, LRT, and StreamTools!
Step 3: User Stops & Starts
- Activate data plans & SIMS for unlimited data
- Stop and start as needed
- Reactivate as needed allowing for ample time to reconnect to providers
- Plans are Unlimited, with a ”fair use” clause
- USA Kits and International Kits will be different hardware with different part numbers, due to regional limitations.
- Customers make no commitment, they can start and stop at any time
- The PRO Kits support 3 data regions (with more coming)
- The monthly subscription services are inclusive of LRT (Solo Stream Tools and Solo PRO Connect).
Key limitations:
- Worldwide Traveler Kits will not work with legacy Live Solo, only LiveU Solo PRO
- Solo PRO Connect is intended (for now) for HD use, and will only use bitrates appropriate to HD
- We do not support BYOD for Solo PRO Connect
Solo Connect Pro Data Plans include LRT™
- Bonding up to 6 IP connections
- Rock-solid reliability
Solo Connect Pro includes LiveU Solo StreamTools
- A unified cloud video production workflow
Multi-Destinations
- Stream to multiple social platforms at a click of a button
- Simultaneously stream up to 3 online platforms: social networks, online media, video platforms, RTMP/s for dedicated websites, any other CDN
Fallback Screen
- It pays to be prepared, StreamTools has your back
- Keep your audience engaged, even during brief absences
Students learn theater design through the power of play
As a mechanical engineering and theater double major, senior Alayo Oloko often finds herself at the western end of MIT’s campus in Building W97, where the academic program in theater at MIT is based.
During her time as an actor, designer, and technical crew member in student-driven theater at MIT, Oloko has overseen the chaos of “tech week,” where design decisions and rehearsals come together on a pressure-cooker timeline. She calls theater a team sport: “If you mess something up or you drop the ball, it doesn’t just impact you. It impacts the entire production and the entire end product,” she recounts.
But just like team sports, theater is, at its heart, a kind of play, whether under the limelight, backstage, or in the classroom. “We’re always laughing during rehearsals or technical meetings because you’re always surrounded by a bunch of other creative people. And you’re bouncing ideas off each other as you’re all bonded together by a common goal,” says Oloko.
Designing for theater
In the theater world, a team of designers, makers, and actors often bring a writer’s script to the stage with the help of a director. Traditionally, design responsibilities in theater are taken on by different people — set, sound, lighting, and costume designers form the core of the design team. Just as in a sport, each team member is entrusted with bringing out their best while cooperating with the whole team.
Whether it’s a rendition of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” or a more contemporary script, each theater designer has an opportunity to contribute something unique: a design informed by their personal experience. “If you feel it personally, an audience will also feel it personally,” says Sara Brown, professional set designer, professor of theater at MIT, and a member of the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Faculty Advisory Council.
Theater designers can invoke their personal experiences to create worlds with “friction,” a metaphor for the emotional work of individuals needed to grapple with new ideas presented in an artistic piece. “It is a world that has friction that then the actors have to deal with, or a director has to manage, or an audience has to manage,” explains Brown.
This integration of personal experience in design proves critical for a cultural function of theater — to invite an audience to feel represented or empathize with different perspectives, and furthermore, to reflect the intricacies of real life.
However, digging into one’s personal experience can be challenging for young designers. As with children roughhousing or building sandcastles, play is an opportunity to experiment in a safe environment and build social and emotional skills, yet it is not effortless.
Play in practice — exploring sound
Although professional theater production is notoriously high-stakes in practice, subject to constraints such as strict timelines and budgets, the classroom setting, by contrast, allows students to set aside real-world concerns and better embrace the imaginative and expressive process of play.
“We call them plays for a reason. It’s not only sort of a play on words,” says Christian Frederickson, sound designer and technical instructor in music and theater at MIT. “The process of learning it should be fun,” he adds.
As a sound designer, Frederickson creates audio cues and music to accompany a live performance, making decisions on where to place these cues in time, and when it’s better to let silence speak.
“Sound design for theater is not creating or not trying to duplicate reality. It’s looking for ways to help the storytelling in — at least for me — the most direct and elegant way possible, and in our contemporary world there’s a lot of noise. If we try to duplicate that in the theater, we get a mess. So it’s about refining and looking for the most direct way to tell a story or help the audience have an emotional experience,” he says.
The first lesson in Frederickson’s class involves getting to know one’s personal style. In his courses 21T.223 (Sound Design) and 21T.232 (Producing Podcasts), Frederickson introduces students to the fields through a “game” he calls Everything is an Instrument. “The reason I call it a ‘game’ is that I think it’s fun, and I think my students think it’s fun because there are no particular rules,” he says.
In the game, Frederickson and his students take a short recording of a “mundane everyday object” such as a metal water bottle or sheet of paper. After demonstrating the capabilities of Adobe Audition (a digital audio workstation), he lets students loose to manipulate the audio sample and begin finding their own styles.
“If there are 20 students in the class, we get 20 completely different results from the same sample material,” Frederickson says. “I can tell this student makes these really sparse, interesting, textural pieces, and then this person is always trying to turn their sample into something from musical theater.”
Trained as a musician, Frederickson considers his sound designs to have a musical quality, though he may be composing with the sound of helicopters and explosions instead of instruments. By playing the game, students tap into their personal interests and experience to inform their sound designs, influencing the play.
Responding and resonating with design
“[Theater design] is not just asking you to fit yourself to a task. It’s actually asking you to bring yourself to that task,” says Sara Brown. This, to Brown, sets theater design apart from other design philosophies. To unlock one’s personal experience, Brown asks designers to consider “first and foremost, how do you intersect with the material physically, personally?”
Like in Frederickson’s game Everything is an Instrument, Brown introduces her classes to theater design by way of playing with mundane materials. During one of the first in-class exercises for class 21T.220 (Set Design), students in small teams rummage through bins full of scrap paper, fabric, and matboard, prompted by an evocative word to guide their vision and hands.
Set designers work from scripts and references to develop a plan for the overall set — everything from the type of flooring to adding walls and platforms. One traditional method of communicating a set design is to create a physical model. Working with a scale model of W97’s black box theater space, students place their scrap materials into the model; evaluating their designs, these begin to take shape. Brown elaborates: “we start to see that when you make design decisions, you’re making design decisions in response to a reality.”
The unpretentious choice of materials and use of a prompt inspire set design students like rising seniors Verose Agbing and Alayo Oloko to make design choices without hesitation, thwarting the dreaded “blank-page anxiety” caused by overthinking.
For Oloko, this “quick-and-dirty prototyping” is essential to see if something works. “If it does, that’s great. If it doesn’t, OK, it didn’t take too much time,” she says.
But Brown’s mention of “reality” is not to be confused with “real life.” In fact, Brown encourages students to shed any notions of real-life constraints. Also involved with student theater outside of the classroom, Oloko prompts: “imagine what you could do if you could go crazy and then figure out which parts of that work within it … In your initial design, if you’re limiting yourself by budget, you might overconstrain yourself without even realizing it.”
“My catchphrase in the class became ‘this is not OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] certified’ because … in the beginning, I was definitely stuck on that notion of being able to stick with real life,” says Agbing. Inspired by modern and experimental theater sets, Agbing recounts gradually letting go of these preconceptions, finding software an even more rewarding and flexible platform for theater design projects.
Set design students learn Vectorworks, an architecture modeling program, in conjunction with Twinmotion, a 3D visualization program, in a modern approach to theater design. “With the software, I was able to create this beautiful blend of … contrasting lighting and being able to manipulate that intensity was really important,” observes Agbing.
How play connects us
While MIT Theater takes this playful approach to design, it doesn’t mean its objectives are only fun and games. “I don’t think that the stakes are lower in theater by any means,” says Frederickson. As an educator, he sees theater at MIT as a safe setting for students to “explore individual expression” and “develop design skills that you didn’t know that you needed or were going to use.”
As theater aims not to replicate reality, it is a chance to “play pretend” for both designers and audiences to consider difficult ideas at a distance. The immersion into a fictionalized world is an opportunity for audiences to feel represented, entertain new ideas, and cultivate empathy. For theater designers, the process of designing a performance allows for the exploration of multifaceted personal experiences which may be challenging or complex.
Echoing Frederickson’s sentiment, technical instructor and video designer Josh Higgason — who offers courses in Lighting Design (21T.221) and Interactive Design and Projection for Live Performance (21T.320) — finds that with his students, “there’s a lot of learning of how to have empathy, how to have connection, how to foster connection, and how to talk about difficult things when we first start.”
By the end of the term, equipped with the tools to thoughtfully express “big ideas and big emotions,” theater designers and audiences become members of a larger community more able to handle friction and bridge differences. Higgason reflects: “One of [theater’s] many purposes is to try and tell stories of people and individuals. But it also gets to stand in for these bigger, universal stories or these bigger, universal experiences.”
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A framework for solving parabolic partial differential equations
Computer graphics and geometry processing research provide the tools needed to simulate physical phenomena like fire and flames, aiding the creation of visual effects in video games and movies as well as the fabrication of complex geometric shapes using tools like 3D printing.
Under the hood, mathematical problems called partial differential equations (PDEs) model these natural processes. Among the many PDEs used in physics and computer graphics, a class called second-order parabolic PDEs explain how phenomena can become smooth over time. The most famous example in this class is the heat equation, which predicts how heat diffuses along a surface or in a volume over time.
Researchers in geometry processing have designed numerous algorithms to solve these problems on curved surfaces, but their methods often apply only to linear problems or to a single PDE. A more general approach by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) tackles a general class of these potentially nonlinear problems.
In a paper recently published in the Transactions on Graphics journal and presented at the SIGGRAPH conference, they describe an algorithm that solves different nonlinear parabolic PDEs on triangle meshes by splitting them into three simpler equations that can be solved with techniques graphics researchers already have in their software toolkit. This framework can help better analyze shapes and model complex dynamical processes.
“We provide a recipe: If you want to numerically solve a second-order parabolic PDE, you can follow a set of three steps,” says lead author Leticia Mattos Da Silva SM ’23, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and CSAIL affiliate. “For each of the steps in this approach, you’re solving a simpler problem using simpler tools from geometry processing, but at the end, you get a solution to the more challenging second-order parabolic PDE.”
To accomplish this, Da Silva and her coauthors used Strang splitting, a technique that allows geometry processing researchers to break the PDE down into problems they know how to solve efficiently.
First, their algorithm advances a solution forward in time by solving the heat equation (also called the “diffusion equation”), which models how heat from a source spreads over a shape. Picture using a blow torch to warm up a metal plate — this equation describes how heat from that spot would diffuse over it. This step can be completed easily with linear algebra.
Now, imagine that the parabolic PDE has additional nonlinear behaviors that are not described by the spread of heat. This is where the second step of the algorithm comes in: it accounts for the nonlinear piece by solving a Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) equation, a first-order nonlinear PDE.
While generic HJ equations can be hard to solve, Mattos Da Silva and coauthors prove that their splitting method applied to many important PDEs yields an HJ equation that can be solved via convex optimization algorithms. Convex optimization is a standard tool for which researchers in geometry processing already have efficient and reliable software. In the final step, the algorithm advances a solution forward in time using the heat equation again to advance the more complex second-order parabolic PDE forward in time.
Among other applications, the framework could help simulate fire and flames more efficiently. “There’s a huge pipeline that creates a video with flames being simulated, but at the heart of it is a PDE solver,” says Mattos Da Silva. For these pipelines, an essential step is solving the G-equation, a nonlinear parabolic PDE that models the front propagation of the flame and can be solved using the researchers’ framework.
The team’s algorithm can also solve the diffusion equation in the logarithmic domain, where it becomes nonlinear. Senior author Justin Solomon, associate professor of EECS and leader of the CSAIL Geometric Data Processing Group, previously developed a state-of-the-art technique for optimal transport that requires taking the logarithm of the result of heat diffusion. Mattos Da Silva’s framework provided more reliable computations by doing diffusion directly in the logarithmic domain. This enabled a more stable way to, for example, find a geometric notion of average among distributions on surface meshes like a model of a koala.
Even though their framework focuses on general, nonlinear problems, it can also be used to solve linear PDE. For instance, the method solves the Fokker-Planck equation, where heat diffuses in a linear way, but there are additional terms that drift in the same direction heat is spreading. In a straightforward application, the approach modeled how swirls would evolve over the surface of a triangulated sphere. The result resembles purple-and-brown latte art.
The researchers note that this project is a starting point for tackling the nonlinearity in other PDEs that appear in graphics and geometry processing head-on. For example, they focused on static surfaces but would like to apply their work to moving ones, too. Moreover, their framework solves problems involving a single parabolic PDE, but the team would also like to tackle problems involving coupled parabolic PDE. These types of problems arise in biology and chemistry, where the equation describing the evolution of each agent in a mixture, for example, is linked to the others’ equations.
Mattos Da Silva and Solomon wrote the paper with Oded Stein, assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. Their work was supported, in part, by an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Fellowship funded by Google, a MathWorks Fellowship, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center, Adobe Systems, and Google Research.
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