CWcollab: A Context-Aware Web-Based Collaborative Multimedia System

TL;DR

CWcollab is a versatile, bandwidth-efficient web-based multimedia collaboration platform that enables precise, interactive, and replayable remote collaboration on various media types, addressing limitations of existing tools.

Contribution

It introduces a general-purpose multimedia collaboration system supporting media controls with object-prioritized synchronization and replay capabilities, improving upon prior tools.

Findings

Supports fine-grained, accurate collaboration

Uses significantly less bandwidth for event storage

Enables rich interaction and replay of collaboration sessions

Abstract

Remote collaboration tools for conferencing and presentation are gaining significant popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Most prior work has issues, such as a) limited support for media types, b) lack of interactivity, for example, an efficient replay mechanism, c) large bandwidth consumption for screen sharing tools. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose multimedia collaboration platform-CWcollab. It supports collaboration on general multimedia by using simple messages to represent media controls with an object-prioritized synchronization approach. Thus, CWcollab can not only support fine-grained accurate collaboration, but also rich functionalities such as replay of these collaboration events. The evaluation shows hundreds of kilobytes can be enough to store the events in a collaboration session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes of Google Hangouts.