Network Control and Tools for Electron Microscopy

Extract

Recently there has been great interest in creating Internet and Intranet tools for electron microscopy. We can somewhat arbitrarily divide the goals of these tools into three categories: (1) Service lab interaction, (2) Laboratory extension, (3) Teaching & outreach. The service lab wants to disseminate the results of experiments quickly to its customers. Sometimes it needs to do this during the experiments for verification that the experiments are being correctly performed, but most collaboration problems can be solved with a phone discussion while looking at the same image. This level of interactivity is not sufficient for the laboratory extension community that wants real time experimental results and perhaps even controls of the equipment projected to a remote location. Finally, several groups have expressed interest in bringing observation and control of instrumentation into the classroom to potentially many computers and potentially many different displays of the experiment in progress.