To create, for example, the virtual conference room spoken of, we need
not only the mechanism for incorporating individual's pictures to our
room, but one to synchronize their motions with sound, to handle the
(possibly) varied sampling rates of distinct forms of audio/video and
perhaps other chronological sequences (Vinay Kumar's "gesture recording"
comes to mind).
For generality, please consider both the linear and cyclic aspects of
time, those that distinguish "from now til then" from "every 6th Monday
at noon." Making this distinction, I'd propose a simple schema for
allowing systems to set up synchronizer systems using a "cookie cutter"
view of time -- if any of you recall the child's toy Spirograph in which
a circle with a pencil hole through the rim was rolled through a larger
circle to create interesting looping patterns -- in which these periodic
events can be described and then actively "rolled" to create an active
schedule. Thereby, if in our conference room, we could create not only
mechanisms for "show this and then this", but we could have clients which
knew the intended rates for each input and would trim/pad the input to
keep all media synchronous.
I believe that the generic encoding of time is one of the primary
issues in moving from a document-centered view of the Web to an
information-centered view.
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Jason Bluming
Enterprise Integration Technologies
jbluming@eit.com
(415) 617 - 8018 (office) | 459 Hamilton Avenue
617 - 8019 (fax) | Palo Alto, CA 94301
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