Learning Piano Remotely

I just read about an interesting educational project at Acadia University in Nova Scotia:

The goals of the MusicPath project were to interconnect digital acoustic pianos in “real time” via high speed networks over long distances using the MIDI protocol, to investigate the twinning of the delivery of MIDI with videoconferencing and to examine how such an inter-connection could change the delivery of music education, examination and performance.

The project page notes that the next step is to “to use the digital ink capability of the Tablet PC’s to allow the teaching to include direct transfer of the marked up musical scores.” Given the attention to nuance required to teach high-level music lessons, I wonder how well this technology would work. Obviously, there’d have to be no latency. Like, absolutely none. What good is it if you’re listening to a student and have to wait for the streaming audio to buffer?

On the otherwise useless Project Journal page, there’s a video clip that apparently discusses the project and shows the system in action. Ironically, I can’t watch the video stream because of the usual buffering/streaming/network bogosity.