Novel Web-based Remote Collaboration System Architecture for Wider Use Cases

Abstract

Although web-based remote collaboration systems are getting popular, they are not suitable for long-distance or demanding use cases due to the web browser limitations. To cover wider range of use cases, we propose novel architecture for web-based remote collaboration systems. The main features are relay-servers, overlay-managers, and timecode-servers. The relay-servers enable the web-based systems to exchange data smoothly and locally even in long-distance collaboration. The overlay-managers and timecode-servers enable web-based systems to deal with native applications in order to provide high quality collaboration experience. A prototype is implemented and tested to confirm that the proposal can construct unprecedented collaboration systems suitable for long-distance and demanding collaboration scenarios; targets not possible with conventional web-based collaboration systems.