The VideoWindow System in Informal Communications

Imagine sitting in your work place lounge having coffee with some colleagues. Now imagine that you and your colleagues are still in the same room, but are separated by a large sheet of glass that does not interfere with your ability to carry on a clear, two-way conversation. Finally, imagine that you have split the room into two parts and moved one part 50 miles down the road, without impairing the quality of your interaction with your friends. That scenario illustrates the goal of the VideoWindow system project: to extend a shared space over considerable distance without impairing the quality of the interactions among users or requiring any special actions to establish a conversation. While the VideoWindow system -a very large screen, full duplex teleconferencing technology that we will describe later in this paper -cannot yet achieve this goal, we believe it can come closer to it than any other system yet invented.