A Heterogeneous Multimedia Toolkit for Desktop Collaboration

The Internet and related technologies have enabled collaboration between remote users across heterogeneous computing environments. However, the first generation of these collaboration tools, including electronic mail, file transfer, and remote login provide only the most primitive of collaboration tools. Recent advancements in technology have enabled video teleconferencing (VTC) applications to provide multimedia to the desktop. However, most current collaboration tools are monolithic in nature, and only support multimedia between users across a homogeneous computing environment. There are still many obstacles that must be overcome before the vision of a truly integrated collaboration environment is realized. In this proposed project, we plan to implement a Heterogeneous Multimedia Toolkit (HMT), which is based upon the MASH framework developed at University of California, Berkeley. The MASH framework incorporates the popular MBone video conferencing tools, and provides an extensible architecture that allows for new and innovative tools and techniques to be integrated into the framework. HMT provides desktop collaboration capabilities across heterogeneous platforms, including UNIX, Windows, and MacOS operating systems. Additionally, HMT empowers network-aware applications to take advantage of ATM networks which offer guaranteed bandwidth and QoS. In short, HMT pushes the state of the art in desktop collaboration.