Meta-applications are basically presentation like applications that 'play' over time and control the various services available in the room (such as media, speech, computer, display services etc). They can incorporate and coordinate multimedia, applications and services into an automated presentation that can be played on demand.
The Meta Applications Editor allows the creation, deletion and modification of these meta-applications which can then be played within a LiveSpace. The same editor can also be used for creating 'session' meta-apps (see Session Manager).
Meta applications use a tree-structured data model to specify how the meta-app should be 'played'. Execution group (see Meta Applications Editor) nodes allow the child nodes to be played either sequentially or in parallel. Playing a meta-app basically involves traversing down the tree and playing each node, with sequential nodes being played one-by-one in order and parallel nodes being played all at once.
Meta applications can link to other meta applications (or nodes within other meta applications) and can be organised using tags. Pre-defined tags can be used to define meta apps as being sessions, or lighting scenes (see Session Manager. User-defined tags can be created as required to group related meta applications as the users of the room see fit. This can help to organise the listing of the meta applications on Ignite.
The concept of a 'priority' is used for the playing of media items, powerpoint presentations etc. to decouple the meta applications from specific displays within a Livespace (for portability across different Livespaces). The Livespace Viewer service/panel is used to associate priorities with computers, or 'views' on the desktop of computers. The priority attribute of a media item (or similar) node means that when the meta application is played this media item will be displayed on all available 'viewers' with a matching priority. Policies can be set as to what should occur if there aren't any available matching priorities (such as ignore playing the media, or play after currently playing items have finished etc).
Rename "TTS" to "Audio" and generalise to be a room-wide audio service: TSS, sound media. Also merge volume entities.
Need to agree on fallback behaviour for ppt presentations
Would be nice to have a mechanism of restoring the room at the end of the meta-app to the configuration that existed before starting the meta-app