Working with Dr. Prasun Dewan and Dr. Kevin Jeffay, I tried to clarify and conceptualize the idea of "real-time" support in non-multimedia collaborative applications. I started by looking into the Colab Bus, Media Adaptation, and collaborative applications. I generated a few ideas on how we might combine the concepts from these works. Three issues I have considered are (1) dynamic synchronization in non-multimedia collaborative applications, (2) Bursty traffic (jitter) in non-multimedia collaborative applications, and (3) considering multimedia data as first class objects.
In collaborative applications, how and when we see the actions of other users are important issues. By investigating different approaches to these two issues, we hope to clarify the idea of "real-time" support in collaborative applications and find ways to support it.
In terms of how one sees the actions of other users, an important dimension is a sense of presence for the actions taken by other users. In other words, in collaborative applications we want to be able to have some way to see the process of actions taken by other users. How we can support such functionality needs more thought.
Furthermore, when we see the actions of other users can be thought of as different levels of synchrony. In collaborative applications, there is a fundamental trade off between interactive response time and levels of synchrony with other users. By coupling different levels of synchrony with system performance, we could manage this trade off better in collaborative applications. Dynamic synchronization in non-multimedia collaborative applications refers to the idea of coupling different levels of synchrony with system performance. Defining the different levels of synchrony, measuring system performance, and ways of coupling them (ranging from automatically to user specified) need to be thought out more.
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