Authoring multimedia objects in collaborative ambient intelligent virtual environment

Authoring multimedia objects may be challenging when done in a collaborative ambient intelligent (AmI) environment where both the authors and the objects are geographically distributed. In our earlier work, we created a tool called LORNAV that allows an author to visualize different multimedia objects in a 3D virtual environment and to aggregate those objects and represent them in a SMIL 2.0 format. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative authoring environment that uses LORNAV´s visualization and authoring services and enables multiple authors to create aggregated objects in real time based on ambient information. The overall authoring process is also enhanced with the addition of moderation and multipoint-to-multipoint audio/video conferencing services. The collaborative AmI environment is based on a JXTA peer-to-peer (P2P) network.