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Videoconferencing systems are getting closer to technical perfection every year, making them more and more pleasant to use. However, the usual setting of these systems favors a face to face situation between all the participants of each site, which makes cross-site informal conversations difficult: before and after a formal meeting or during pauses, people tend to discuss with some of their co-located partners and often ignore the remote people. I think that one of the keys to informal communication in these situations is the ability for people to move away from the central focus point of the formal meeting and gather in small groups isolated from each others.
Starting from this idea, I designed le puits (the well), a new communication device that combines an SGI O2 workstation with microphones, cameras, speakers and an horizontal video projection system to establish an audio and video link between distant groups of up to 6 people. The hardware setup of le puits was done in cooperation with the acoustic department of CSTB and the iMAGIS group from INRIA. The software was developed with the videoSpace toolkit. The whole project was sponsored by France Télécom R&D.
See [1, 2, 3, 4] for more information. A few pictures and screenshots are also available.
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