SUITESOUND - A SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE MULTIMEDIA

Multimedia has the same potential to revolutionize human-computer inte rfaces that bitmapped workstations have realized over the last decade. Like bitmapped workstations, multimedia provides a more familiar envi ronment to the users. Achieving this potential requires the developmen t of programming environments with integrated support for multimedia. Suite-Sound is one such environment SuiteSound is built in the Suite o bject-based system on a conventional UNIX operating system. SuiteSound objects incorporate multimedia by creating flows and filters. Flows a re streams of multimedia data moving through a sequence of objects. Th ey bridge the gap between objects representing the state of an entity at a discrete point in time and space and continuous media such as liv e audio or video. Filters are intermediate objects between the source and destination of a flow. They take a flow as input, perform one of s everal operations such as multiplex-in, multiplex-out, gain control, o r silence deletion on it, and send the resulting flow to its destinati on. In effect, they provide a virtual device interface for the applica tion programmer that is uniform and independent of any physical device . This paper describes the design and implementation of SuiteSound on the Sun SparcStation. We perform experiments to determine the network and CPU load of the sound tool, detail experiences using the SuiteSoun d environment and applications, and suggest future work.