See, What I See (SWIS); Design and Implementation of a Virtual Living Room in Cyberspace

Abstract

People invite friends to their home to watch their favorite movie. They gather around a TV and watch the movie while having a conversation. Watching movie and television together is a common social activity, but web video does not support this synchronous watching and conversations. Nowadays videos are watched alone without co-presence and social interactions are confined to asynchronous comment threads left by family and friends. Social networking services and internet applications are trying hard to make it easier for individuals to communicate when they are apart from each other. These services and facilities remove geographical distances between people since they are able to talk and see each other at any moment. Different applications have variety of services to keep people updated about their friends by different kinds of media. In the era of multimedia communication a rich interactive application which simulates a living room in cyberspace can make the communication much easier and interesting. In this thesis we build a service which simulates a virtual living room in the cyberspace. In this service people will be able to plan and watch a movie in someone’s virtual living room. They will also be able to talk, share and interact using different communications media such as text, voice or video. This application is implemented to be used in state of art web browser without downloading any additional plug-in, except a flash viewer, which is widely available in most of the computer and devices.