Design and implementation of an advanced telecollaboration system.

Abstract

In this thesis, we investigate two advanced features, which greatly enhance a telecollaboration system. The first one is real time audio and video synchronous communication among the participants. The second is the collaborative session recording service that enables the asynchronous collaboration. We describe our design and implementation of a real time audio and video tool JVC, and a recording tool JVCR. JVC can capture, transmit and present the real time audio and video streams among all participants. The audio and video data are transmitted by RTP and LP multicast for efficiency. Different from other Internet-based audio and video tools, JVC is developed with Java and based on the Java Media Framework (JMF). Therefore, JVC is platform independent and well suited for the heterogeneous Internet environment. JVCR is a WWW-based recording tool. It records all multimedia components of a collaborative session, such as user interactions with the JETS whiteboard developed by the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa. It also records the associated live audio and video streams distributed by JVC in the collaboration session. A novel feature of JVCR is that it dynamically creates SMIL documents to specify the synchronization relationship of all captured components as well as the hypertext links to these components. Therefore, the recorded session can be easily accessed through the Web and played-back by any SMIL-enabled players. JVCR is also developed with pure Java for platform independence.