A joint contribution from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, ConferenceXP has been accepted into the foundation's newly established Research Accelerators Gallery. The project integrates audio, video and network technologies to connect multiple participants in an immersive environment for distance conference, instruction, and collaboration, the foundation said.

ConferenceXP also serves as a research platform for distance learning and collaboration applications. The platform features APIs enabling researchers and developers to build distributed applications that take advantage of underlying collaboration technology.

"Academic institutions and researchers understand the benefits of e-learning and collaboration software and have made significant progress advancing the technology," said Paula Hunter, executive director of Outercurve, in a statement released by the foundation. "The assignment of the ConferenceXP project to the Outercurve Foundation will make this advanced learning and collaboration platform broadly available to the benefit of all in the research and open source communities."

Other galleries at Outercurve include the ASP.Net Open Source Gallery and the Systems Infrastructure and Integration Gallery. Outercurve has nine projects within its jurisdiction.