Collaborative tools are developed to support work being undertaken by dispersed teams. As well as allowing voice and audio, several initiatives have supported collaborative information-rich tasks by enabling dispersed participants to share their visualization insights and to exercise some distributed control.

In previous work, tools for collaborative visualization have been based on dataflow visualization systems, allowing visual programs to be rapidly prototyped and allowing not only the sharing of final results but also the process of obtaining them.

However there are a number of issues: (1) the need for software policy changes, according to different meeting styles; (2) the presence of competing continuous flows, including voice and video of the participants and visualization movie sequences, in addition to bulk data flows; and (3) the dynamics of available resources which vary between participants or between mobile and office situations or within a single meeting.

This need for adaptation is being studied in the Visual Beans project in the UK. The technologies under study include component technology, based on Java and CORBA, the use of continuous media in CORBA components, quality of service (QoS) monitoring and the use of open bindings.