Webcast Joins Roses on Parade

As the 1998 Tournament of Roses Parade approaches, dozens of volunteers at Fiesta Parade Floats Co. in Duarte attend to traditional, if tedious, tasks like trimming the petals off dried flowers and using tweezers to pick bits of straw out of boxes full of lentil beans.

And then there’s Aldis Garsvo, a senior video producer at Edison International, monitoring four cellular phones, three laptop computers and two video cameras and screens arrayed on folding card tables and connected to giant electric batteries.

Such equipment is hardly standard for Rose Parade floats, which by order of the Tournament of Roses Assn. must emphasize the organic over the electronic. But Edison’s 1998 float--fittingly titled “Our Science Project”--is becoming a 22-ton test lab itself.

The last week before New Year’s Day is high season for a dedicated cadre of volunteer float builders, and this year’s crew includes about half a dozen technical experts who are outfitting the Edison float to broadcast live pictures from the parade route to the World Wide Web (https://www.edisonx.com) using a completely solar-powered system.

The theme for this year’s parade is “Hav’n Fun,” and Edison’s float plays on the idea that education is fun. Atop the 18-by-55-foot float platform, two kids are building a robotic dog using plans they’ve downloaded from the Internet. Bob the dog would be a worthy pet for the Jetson family, with mechanical limbs and twin spinning satellite receivers on his back.

By 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day, Bob and the rest of the float will be covered with rice, seeds and flower petals that have already begun to arrive from 15 different countries. The one exception will be a bank of solar panels on Bob’s back that will charge the float’s electric batteries. (The company had to get special permission from parade organizers to leave the solar panels unadorned.)

“This is the world’s largest electric vehicle,” said Charlie Basham, project manager for the float.

Altogether, 62 six-volt deep-cycle batteries will be used to power the float--36 to drive it, 24 to make Bob’s neck move up and down and his mouth to open and shut, and two to power Garsvo’s computer and cellular equipment. Technicians have been “exercising” the batteries for the last month and a half by charging them up to capacity, running them down and recharging them again.

While running such a behemoth on solar-powered batteries is no small feat, it’s certainly within Edison International’s traditional expertise. The Webcasting system, on the other hand, required some creative engineering.

Garsvo, the float’s technical coordinator, used off-the-shelf components to create a one-of-a-kind system. Two video cameras--one hidden in Bob’s nose and the other mounted near the back of the float--feed signals into the laptops outfitted with video capture cards.

Garsvo and his assistants--hidden inside an oversized toolbox at the rear of the float--will select still images to transmit, save them as JPEG files and send them off using the Internet’s standard file transfer protocol.

The cellular phones will send the signals to L.A. Cellular’s towers, where they will be directed to a special bank of Star-Data modems designed to transmit data at 9,600 bits per second. Then the image is routed to a land line for the final journey to Edison’s computer servers in Rosemead. New pictures can be uploaded at the rate of one a minute.

Tim Estes, president of Fiesta Parade Floats, said he wasn’t surprised when the Edison team proposed its high-tech plan, since the company has a history of introducing innovations at the parade. (Last year, Edison used a much simpler system to transmit crude pictures to the Web and logged 2,000 visitors from 32 countries.)

When a committee from the Tournament of Roses came in Friday morning for a quick inspection of the float, they lingered at Garsvo’s table for more than 10 minutes.

In future Rose Parades, Garsvo looks forward to adding streaming video and sound to Edison’s Webcast, but he said that’s probably more than a year away. Besides, there are still plenty of hurdles to clear before sunrise Thursday.

“They’re like the kids on the float,” Basham said of Garsvo’s technical team. “They’re coming up with all these great ideas and they’re pushing the technology.”

Times staff writer Karen Kaplan covers technology, telecommunica-tions and aerospace. She can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com