Rapidly Prototyping Multimedia Groupware
Date
2005-05-09
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Abstract
Multimedia groupware systems provide rich support for distributed
team work. Yet effective design of these systems is difficult because they
must cater to complex human and social factors. Rapid prototyping partially
mitigates this, for it allows designers to build, deploy, test and quickly
evolve design ideas. The problem is that multimedia groupware is hard to
prototype because distributed multimedia systems are complex to implement. To
solve this problem, we offer the Collabrary, a toolkit specifically designed
for easy prototyping of multimedia groupware. The Collabrary blends real-time
streaming multimedia, asynchronous shared application state, and novel
multimedia analysis and manipulation algorithms to provide rich functionality
for distributed teamwork. Implementing core functionality - multimedia
capture, analysis, manipulation, transmission and rendering - is trivial. The
Collabrary also affords lessons that inform the design of universally
accepted toolkits for building distributed multimedia systems: we illustrate
why toolkits should be accessible for learnability, lightweight so easy ideas
are easy to build, and flexible so that novel unanticipated ideas are
possible to implement.
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Computer Science