The following post is an adaptation of a press release delivered by Kurento. We would like to thank them for their collaboration and to congratulate them for receiving these awards.

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FIWARE gets "Best of Show" award at WebRTC Conference Expo Paris 2014. This is the most important conference in Europe for WebRTC, a new wave of real-time multimedia technologies bringing video-conferences and video-communications directly to the browser in a standard way and without requiring any kind of installation. FIWARE got the award through an application combining Kurento (the Stream Oriented Generic Enabler implementation) and Orion (the Context Broker) to demonstrate the viability of using advanced computer vision technologies and augmented reality to improve the security of cities and the safety of citizens. This award reinforces FIWARE approach: combining last generation multimedia technologies with Internet of Things and thus providing innovative ways to exploit machine-to-machine and person-to-machine video communications for Smart Cities.

In November 2014, Kurento.org announced that it had received the “Best WOW Factor” and “Audience Choice” awards from TMC, Systemwide Media and PKE Consulting, at 2014 WebRTC Conference & Expo V. Kurento.org is an open source software project providing a WebRTC media server and a set of client APIs, making simple the development of advanced video applications for WWW and smartphone platforms. Kurento Media Server features include group communications, transcoding, recording, mixing, broadcasting and routing of audiovisual flows. This makes possible for developers to create applications going beyond the plain call model.

“These awards, obtained at the heart of Silicon Valley, in the most important WebRTC Conference of the world and competing against the most relevant companies in the WebRTC arena, are a very relevant milestone in our project and reinforce our vision and our energy for continuing to contribute to creating an ecosystem of really open technologies around WebRTC”, said Dr. Lopez, the project coordinator. These awards are very important for the Kurento.org project, which is still on maturation status and needs to gain the appropriate critical mass for becoming a successful open source community.

“On behalf of WebRTC Conference & Expo, I am very pleased to recognize the innovation demonstrated by Kurento.org at the 2014 Demo Awards” said Carl Ford, Event Co-Producer, WebRTC Conference & Expo V. “Companies like Kurento.org are the driving force behind the growth of WebRTC. Kurento.org truly deserves this award and I look forward to more innovative solutions from them in the future.” “It is my pleasure to grant a 2014 WebRTC Conference & Expo Demo Award to Kurento.org for their innovative media server solution,” said Event Producer and TMC President Dave Rodriguez. “It is our pleasure to be able to honor Kurento.org for their inspiring work.”

Dr. Luis Lopez explains the project in this terms: “If I see and X-ray or if I listen to a heart beating through a video-conference, the information I obtain is quite different to the one perceived by an expert cardiologist. However, current state of the art makes it possible to use computer vision, speech analysis and augmented reality to capture the expert’s knowledge and depict the appropriate diagnosis information to me in a comprehensive way onto my video-conference. In this way, my knowledge and my senses could be extended by the communication system in ways I cannot event imagine today. Kurento.org provides the appropriate framework for integrating this type of capabilities with WebRTC communication systems in a seamless and direct way.”

Kurento.org can also be used in segments beyond person to person communications, making new business models for advertising, smart cities and other person-to-machine and machine-to-machine scenarios possible. Dr. Lopez presents it in this way “our demos have shown that, by using Kurento, it is is possible to improve the security of cities by integrating computer vision algorithms with street IP cameras, which, can be visualized by the appropriate personnel using WebRTC when an interesting event occurs. We have also shown that it is possible to create new advertising models based on embedding users, through their WebRTC enabled browsers, into virtual environments where they can interact with celebrities or other virtual objects in impressive ways.”