Rethinking video as a technology for interpersonal communications: theory and design implications

This paper reassesses the role of real-time video as a technology to support interpersonal communications at distance. We review three distinct hypotheses about the role of video in the coordination of conversational content and process. For each hypothesis, we identify design implications and outstanding research questions derived from current findings. We first evaluate the non-verbal communication hypothesis, namely the prevailing assumption that the role of video is to supplement speech, and embodied in applications such as videoconferencing and videophone. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of video at the expense of audio. This finding has strong implications for the implementation of such systems, and we make recommendations about both synchronisation and bandwidth allocation. Furthermore our own recent studies of workplace interactions point to other communicative functions of video. Current systems have neglected another potentially vital role of visual information in supporting the process of achieving opportunistic connection. Rather than providing a supplement to audio information, video is used to assess the communication availability of others. Visual information therefore promotes the types of remote opportunistic communications that are prevalent in face-to-face settings. We discuss early experiments with such connection applications and identify outstanding design and implementation issues. Finally we discuss another novel application of video: "video-as-data". Here the video image is used to transmit information about the work objects themselves, rather than information about interactants, creating a dynamic shared workspace, and simulating a shared physical environment. In conclusion we suggest that research move away from an exclusive focus on non-verbal communication, and begin to investigate these other uses of real-time video.