An Architecture and Implementation for Evaluating Synchronization Support for Shared User Experiences

Synchronous shared experience has been studied in recent past in perspective of stream-based media. Inter-destination synchronization mechanism is fundamental requirement of synchronous shared experience. Inter-destination synchronization in stream-based media does not work well with the group of participants which varied available bandwidth and computing resources. Document- based media provides functionality of alternative content selection on bases of available resource. This makes document-based media a potential solution for inter-destination synchronization when participants of synchronous shared experience have varied bandwidth and computing resource. This thesis investigated techniques for inter-destination synchronization for stream-based media and adopted them to work with document based media. Firstly we designed and scalable and efficient signaling architecture for exchange of necessary information between participants. We did a prototype implementation of designed architecture. Such architecture was required for implementation and evaluation of inter-destination synchronization techniques for document-based media. Secondly we studied existing inter-destination synchronization techniques for stream-based media in literature. We identified classes of techniques and adopted two of them to work with document-based media. We implemented and evaluated two classes of techniques in this thesis. In order to make synchronous shared experience interactive, action of the participants need to be synchronized across participants. These actions are user interactions which can change state of presentation. Finally we extended inter-destination synchronization techniques to synchronize user interaction actions across distributed participants.