Towards flexible media sharing: Control and coordination issues in network collaborative virtual environment

Media is known as a medium of communication among users. Nowadays, the emergence of communication technology allows users in distributed locations to share and work interactively on digital media elements such as artifacts, documents, images, graphics and audio-video files. Users who work on the same project will form four communication relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, one-to-selected users, many-to-many) and they share the same media. Different types of media require different handling mechanisms, especially when dealing with distributed virtual users on heterogeneous platforms. As a result, controlling and coordinating such media becoming more complex. This paper investigates the control and coordinating factors in relation to media sharing based on platform, users, media access, and API. The investigation involves comparative studies based on related research that focus on media sharing in networked collaborative workspaces. Results from this study are significant to support the control and coordination of flexible media sharing for future research.