Ubiquitous Meeting Facilitator with Playful Real-Time User Interface

Effective group meetings are important for the productivity of corporations. But many meetings do not achieve their goals because some people are too shy to speak while others are too dominant. To avoid the cost and intrusiveness of human meeting facilitation and to increase self-awareness of conversation behaviors, various types of meeting facilitators have been developed over the past couple of years. We present a prototype that is unique because it captures both individual and group behaviors and provides real time playful feedback. The portable prototype includes a set of table-top microphones with an audio interface to a laptop PC, where audio data are processed and an avatar-based UI displays the shared state of individual and group behaviors during a meeting. The interface reveals not only level of participation, but also several other meaningful but harder to detect behaviors such as turn taking, interruptions, and group laughter. The presentation’s design is deliberately playful to keep participants monitor, self-estimate and improve their meeting behavior.