“This breakthrough … has for us in the music industry really set us off in thinking about amazing possibilities,” he said.
LOLA only operates on Internet2, the university-backed network providing high-speed bandwidth to research and educational institutions in the United States.
The commercial internet that people use to check Facebook and watch YouTube cat videos is too busy and slow for LOLA to function. The lightning-fast technology, however, has potential applications beyond the musical world by helping people far from one another communicate as if they were in the same room, said Dan Nichols, an Internet2 multimedia specialist at the Northern Illinois School of Music.
“Latency is not just an impediment to musical interaction; latency is an impediment to human interaction,” he said. “I look forward to seeing other interactions taking place between people in all fields, all lines of work, using software like this.”
For more news about Internet2 initiatives in higher education, see:
- Despite platform fatigue, educators use AI to bridge resource gaps - February 9, 2026
- 5 things CIOs need to know about IoT - March 20, 2017
- First-ever mobile predictive analytics solution - February 25, 2016