Multipoint Multimedia Conferencing System with Group Awareness Support and Remote Management

A multipoint, multimedia conferencing system called FocusShare is described that uses IPv6/IPv4 multicasting for real-time collaboration, enabling video, audio, and group awareness information to be shared. Multiple telepointers provide group awareness information and make it easy to share attention and intention. In addition to pointing with the telepointers, users can add graphical annotations to video streams and share them with one another. The system also supports attentionsharing using video processing techniques. FocusShare is a modularly designed suite consisting of several simple tools, along with tools for remotely controlling them. The modular design enables the system to be easily adapted to various situations entailing different numbers of displays with different resolutions at multiple sites. The remote control tools enable the chairperson or conference organizer to simultaneously change the settings for a set of tools distributed at multiple sites. Evaluation showed that the implemented attention-sharing techniques are useful; FocusShare was more positively evaluated than conventional video conferencing.