Virtual Collaboration and Media Sharing using COSMOS

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) are providing a powerful mechanism to companies, for training staff and customers in their products, improving their productivity, as well as reducing the cost of product development at the same time. Enhanced with their integration with media streams like audio and video, they can become the main way of collaboration among co-workers. But, the realization of such a system is not a trivial task. Many issues like scene description, session management, stream sharing and synchronization are hard topics that require the development of a framework. COSMOS is such a framework that is based on the new multimedia standard, the MPEG-4 and the state-of-theart development technologies, like Java 3D and JMF. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation issues of COSMOS and how it is integrated with collaborative applications.