A collaborative authoring system for multimedia presentation

We propose a collaborative authoring system for multimedia presentation. Our multimedia authoring system benefits greatly from a 3D spatiotemporal interface which intuitively represents the multimedia presentation in one seamless environment. Our system is composed of an editing system, a media object manager and a collaboration manager. The editing system contains two unique editors; a 3D spatiotemporal editor and a temporal relation network (TRN) editor, in addition to the traditional editors such as timeline editor, tag editor, attribute editor, and text editor. These editors are all shared over the Internet and together they form an easy and efficient multimedia authoring environment. Using our system, users in different places can author multimedia presentations in a unified spatiotemporal space while freely traversing the spatial domain and the temporal domain without changing the context of authoring. Our system also provides users with an intuitive mechanism for representing the conceptual flow of a presentation. We implemented some ideas for efficient concurrency control in our system. They are mainly based on user awareness, multiple versions, fine granularity of locking, and access permissions of shared objects. Some our experiments lead us to conclude that our system is more advantageous than traditional multimedia authoring systems in terms of authoring time and ease of interaction.