Experiences in the design of the well, a group communication device for teleconviviality

ABSTRACT

Over the last forty years, a number of audiovisual systems have been proposed to allow people to communicate over distance. However, although these systems have greatly improved in their ability to support formal meetings, they are still hardly usable for the informal discussions that take place before and after the meeting or during breaks. This paper presents the well, a group communication device that combines audio and video links with an original design to support teleconviviality, the emergence of a relaxed atmosphere well adapted to distributed informal communication. The well is not intended to replace existing video-conferencing systems, but rather to supplement them as a solution to the informal communication problem. After introducing some related work, we provide an overview of the design concept of the well. We then present some details about its hardware configuration and the video compositing software it uses. Finally, we discuss some lessons learned from this work and conclude with directions for future research.

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INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
informal communication, iterative design, prototyping, teleconviviality, video-conferencing