ATRI: an advanced multimedia worktop-architecture and applications

With growing interactions between service features, and the processing of video, audio and text streams based on content rather than as uninterpreted bit streams, many limitations and bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure of existing workstations are uncovered. ATRI is a worktop environment primarily oriented towards interaction and communication among users. The emphasis is on defining a scalable and user-friendly framework that can accommodate simple devices as well as complex multimedia environments. Hence, composition is a key capability and the worktop environment is a kit-set of autonomous components which can be aggregated into more complex and customized services. The architecture is centered around an active backplane with an embedded micro-kernel which provides support for interactions among services; built-in architectural support makes fast context switching, low latency communication between execution threads, and active memory based processing for real-time video or audio streams possible.