Continuous Media in Discrete Objects: Support for Collaborative Multimedia

Abstract

Multimedia has the same potential to revolutionize human-computer interfaces that bitmapped workstations have realized over the last decade. Achieving this potential requires the development of programming environments with integrated support for multimedia. SuiteSound is one such environment. SuiteSound is built in the Suite object-based system on a conventional UNIX operating system. SuiteSound objects incorporate multimedia by creating flows, which are streams of multimedia data moving through a sequence of objects. Flows bridge the gap between objects representing the state of an entity at a discrete point in time and space and continuous media such as live audio or video. This paper describes the design and implementation of SuiteSound on the Sun SparcStation. Three SuiteSound applications are described in detail: a teleconferencing tool, a voice annotator, and a collaborative software inspection tool. Experiences using the SuiteSound environment and applications are detailed, a ..