Multiparty, Multimedia Communications Systems

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in multimedia computer systems and applications. We will explore the important challenges that multimedia systems pose to system and application developers, and describe the main issues involved. An overview of the current systems and research in the area and how they have addressed some of these challenges will be provided, with emphasis on the Xphone Multimedia application development toolkit, developed at Columbia University. 1. INTRODUCTION In recent years, there has been a growing interest in multimedia computer systems and applications. Early systems were limited to logical (as opposed to physical) integration of different media and to stand-alone systems. With the rapid advances witnessed in the computing and networking technologies over the last decade, fully integrated multimedia systems distributed over a network have become a reality. Applications of such systems include videoconferencing [1], group editing [2, 3], multimed..