Marco: A Middleware Architecture for Distributed Multimedia Collaboration

A distributed, real time, collaborative visualization (DRCV) system for four dimensional datasets like fMRI images, can be a valuable tool to support scientific and medical research. Software applications supporting DRCV are lagging due to complex challenges, such as real time rendering, coordinated, real time navigation, dataset management, data location transparency, heterogeneous node management, data replication policies, and so on. In addition, people using DRCV tools are tightened to computing devices with specific configuration, which lower opportunities for remote visualization collaborations. We present a novel middleware to facilitate development of DRCV applications which guarantee high data availability and scalability in terns of collaborative groups and members, and are adaptable to computing devices with varying display capabilities. We also show our prototype implementation of this middleware with performance measurements.