Virtual Collaboration Environment

The goal of the proposed effort is to develop a collaboration environment to support real time collaborative activities and distributed synchronous work space and object manipulation across a wide range of heterogeneous platforms. The proposed virtual collaboration environment (VCE) incorporates the collaboration capabilities into distributed inter module interactions, communications, media formats, and object manipulations in a platform independent fashion. The proposed system will also provide a very efficient API to the application tool developers such that detailed knowledge of the VCE and the heterogeneous underlying hardware and software architectures is hidden from users. Thus, for any collaboration developer, the development of an application collaboration system can be as simple as developing a conventional non collaboration system. For example, the API should provide a collaborative synchronous message passing interface, which will provide an API to users in the same way as that of a conventional MPI, while the capability of collaboration will be incorporated automatically. A high level collaborative application development language (CADL) will also be developed such that a sophisticated collaborative application system can be easily completed by writing less than 20 lines of CADL code or using a very simple drag and drop graphic tool, and be completed in 30 minutes.