Mediazine - a combination of television, radio, WWW, telecommunication and 3D computer sound and graphics

The Mediazine is a distributed interactive multimedia magazine for the Internet including text, applications, images, live audio, live-video, animations, 3D computer graphics. Users and Actors can interactively meet each other in a shared virtual environment that is distributed via computer network. The system uses high quality multimedia streams. For the playback of audio an own developed Spatial Audio Server is used. On one hand it provides output lor the communication system, an Internet-Telephone. On the other hand it manages sound of applications like TV and radio. Additionally spatialized binaural output is provided for the sound: In the virtual environment participants speech the can be located from where their avatars are placed. The participant's sound is coming from the place where the video is presented. The paper describes how the system is built. It focuses on the mechanism of controlling the amount and quality of multimedia information on behalf of the network and the receiver system. Furthermore, the paper discusses how agents can be integrated as components in the system that is organized as an object-oriented application framework. Authors can take advantage of this concept specifying the agent's behavior efficiently in a target domain specific way. Finally, a prototype implementation of the mediazine system is presented.