Web conferencing systems for ubi-media collaboration: Achievements and challenges

Web conferencing systems (WCSs)have entered a golden age of rapid development, as evidenced by more than a dozen commercial products and an expanding consumer population in the past five years. While WCSs have revolutionized the way people communicate and collaborate, there is still a lot of room for improvement in both the technologies and the users experience. In this paper, we summarize the latest achievements in WCS design and implementation from both scientific research and technical engineering, identify open questions and key challenges that deserve more research attention, and discuss interesting directions to explore for better solutions. We envision this paper will stimulate more researchers to explore ubi-media collaboration via WCS.