Video Conferences - Coursework Example

VIDEO CONFERENCES INTRODUCTION Attention Getter: In November 2009, Danah Boyd, a famous Internet blogger and a researcher at Microsoft Research New England, was making a presentation at Web2.0 Expo. This conference was conducted via both front and backchannels with video transmitted in front channel and various discussions, debates and feeds occurring in a backchannel. At some point, video casting became asynchronized with twitter feed transmitted in backchannel, which led to a great confusion and inconvenience for both Danah Boyd as a guest speaker and her audience. This case study vividly illustrates that contemporary videoconferencing includes much more than just a transmission of video footage of a speaker. From event operation perspective, videoconferencing is all about synchronous and accurate transfer of information. Technology mediated communication, including videoconferencing, hypothesizes that as the bandwidth of a communication channel increases, the efficiency of communication increases. This hypothesis is termed the Bandwidth Hypothesis. Therefore, videoconferencing from event management perspective evidently requires multidisciplinary approach. The purpose of this speech is to analyze an element of modern technology, which is videoconferencing in this case, from the standpoint of event operations management. Since videoconferencing practically represents a blend of communication techniques, data information management, technological innovation and organizational processes, this speech covers issues pertaining videoconferencing from each of these areas. VIDEOCONFERENCING AND EVENT PROBLEMATICS Collaborative meetings became a frequent and necessary aspect of work in most companies. In 1999 Verizon white paper indicated that 37% of employee time in the United States is spent attending meetings (Verizon, 1999). Overall, it is estimated over 11 million business meeting occurring on a daily basis (Verizon, 1999). However, similar study in 2003 indicated that the majority of face-to-face meeting participants believe that meetings are a waste of time (Verizon, 2003). This situation reveals two organizational problems. First, the amount of time that people spend in meetings makes it difficult for them to participate in most of them. Second, it can be difficult to remember what was said or accomplished in each one. These problems arise primarily from how participants attend meetings and how archives of meetings are created for later remembering and information retrieval. As participants are frequently traveling to attend face-to-face meetings, the cost-benefit ratio of attending meetings is also soaring. This in turn gives rise to a feeling of “wasted time.” Videoconferencing technologies exist to support the remote participation and group collaboration. Practically, there are two types of videoconferencing – (1) desktop videoconferencing systems and (2) integrated videoconferencing systems. They differ in terms of their purpose and technological sophistication. The development of desktop videoconferencing has been triggered with the development of Internet and its protocols for data transmission. While integrated videoconferencing involves more equipment, such as cameras, displays, peripheral video sources, processors, etc. Integrated videoconferencing systems will be discussed later during the speech. Regardless of type and level of technological sophistication, videoconferencing depends on organizational needs for information sharing and collaborative interaction. Figure 1 illustrates how the purpose of video conference as an event is determined by organizational context. Every videoconferencing system faces the problem of capturing and presenting the “right” information at the “right” time. Moreover, for modern organizations videoconferencing needs to be exchanged among remote sites and video material or recorded Figure 1. Videoconferencing Configuration and Its Determinants information needs to be made available offline for later access. From the event operations perspective, capturing and presenting the “right” information at the “right” time can be difficult since it requires understanding of various activities happening in the room and determining which activity is more important than others. Most current approaches use a single wide angle camera to capture the visual information from all possible activities, disregarding the varying importance of the activities. While this provides an overview of all the activities to remote participants in a videoconferencing or to reviewers of the archive, it fails to provide details of more important activities. Alternative approaches employ a single pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera or multiple static cameras pointed to different regions of the scene. This approach allows capturing details of various activities at the cost of significant human effort. Not only the importance of activities has to be determined by a human operator, but also the camera-view needs to be adjusted (for PTZ cameras) or selected (out of multiple static views) to capture the details of the activity deemed important. In order to reduce the amount of human effort required, recently there has been increasing interest in automating the process of visual information capture, which is widely referred as automatic camera control. Videoconferencing based on automatic camera control offer significant advantages over more traditional approaches and practically consists of the following three stages: (1) Detecting various activities and assigning importance to them; (2) Capturing visual details of as many activities as possible keeping into account the cost of capture; (3) Presenting the captured visual information in an engaging manner. VIDEOCONFERENCING: INTERACTION PERSPECTIVE During videoconferencing, participants perform a wide range of activities depending on the purpose of the meeting. However, conceptually, their activities are similar across most of the video conferences; they present information, review information, generate and analyze solutions, plan, schedule, make decisions, track actions items, and prepare reports. Activities that are important to videoconferencing from event management perspective can be divided into two groups – coarse level activities and subtle level activities. Poltrock et al. analyzed the meetings of several physically collocated teams and divided their activities into three categories (Poltrock and Engelbeck, 1997): (1) Work-centered activities. These activities include presenting, reviewing, creating, editing and annotating work products. (2) People-centered activities. These activities include members greeting each other, interacting socially before settling down, introducing new people to the group etc. (3) Meeting-centered activities. These include scheduling a meeting room, preparing for the video conference, notifying members, starting equipment, managing resources for new members during the video conferences, distribution and archiving of meeting notes etc. Coarse level activities form the shape of a meeting and determine the workflow. Most of them require some amount of conscious effort from the participants. In face-to-face collaborations participants communicate with one another by coordinating, most often effortlessly, various vocal and visual activities. Heath et al. explored these subtle activities which make any collaboration successful (Health et al, 1997). They could be studied under the following three categories: (1) Alignment toward a focal area. Collaborators are always focusing on a common object or artifact (e.g., a document or a computer screen) by coordinating their bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions, and gaze. (2) Peripheral awareness. Participants are always aware of their surroundings even when they are concentrating on a focal area. Awareness is essential for maintaining a continuous communication throughout a collaboration. Monk and Watts further studied the role of awareness in the context of the peripheral participation in communication (Monk and Watts, 1998). (3) Transition from individual to collaborative. Most of the activities during a collaborative meeting are either individual or collaborative, but what makes it a coherent event is the smooth transition between these two activities. In face-to-face meetings, participants often make such transitions by getting involved in multiple, interrelated activities. Thus, subtle activities primarily involve low level communication activities, but they form a major factor to influence the control flow of the meeting. Therefore, videoconferencing set up should be conducted in the manner that reflects both coarse level and subtle level communication activities. VIDEOCONFERENCING: ALTERNATIVE TO FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION In order to become a realistic alternative to face-to-face communication, video conferences must be capable of revealing subtle level activities of participants. The most basic video conferencing systems use a single camera to capture the scene at the local site and send that single view to the remote site. Due to its simplicity and low cost, this setup is also the most commonly used setup (Polycom, 2010). This is also known as the “talking head” form of video conferencing. Fish et al. used this common setup to explore informal communication across a distance in the VideoWindow system (Fish et al, 1990). By capturing a high aspect ratio video from a specially designed camera and displaying it at the remote site on a large display (8 feet wide and 3 feet high) they realized a sense of co-presence without physical proximity. This was one of the first video conferencing systems to show strong evidence that “technology can provide, to a degree, an increased sense of shared space between remote coworkers” (Fish et al, 1990, p.9). Single static or pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera based systems fail to provide peripheral information and do not scale well to multiple users. Therefore, some systems use two cameras: a static camera for a wide view and a controllable camera for close-ups (Yamaashi, et al 1996). In this case, the remote user is shown both of these views either in a picture-in-picture format or separately with links (Yamaashi et al, 1996; Liu et al, 2002). Foote et al. engineered a panoramic video camera, called FlyCam, by combining various inexpensive video cameras in an array (Foote and Kimber, 2000). They also proposed methods to correct lens distortion and merge videos to create a panoramic video. The FlySpec system used this camera in combination with a PTZ camera to show both wide and detailed views of meetings to remote participants (Liu et al, 2002). The system shows a fixed wide view of the scene and allows users to select any circular or rectangular region in that view. Once selected, the PTZ camera moves and zooms to show the detail of the selected region below the overview window as shown on Figure 2. Figure 2. Left-top: Panoramic video camera FlyCam, Left-bottom: FlySpec system consisting of a PTZ camera and a FlyCam, Right-top: A wide view captured by FlyCam with rectangular region selected by a user, Right-bottom: A zoomedin view of the rectangular region captured by the PTZ camera (Foote and Kimber, 2000, Liu et al, 2002). LIMITATION OF VIDEO CONFERENCES Besides asynchronization occurred during videoconferencing that occurred during Web2.0 Expo (discussed during Introduction to this speech), video technology still has significant limitations. One of the main limitations was identified to be a restricted field of view that limits peripheral vision and perceptual exploration (Gaver, 1992). Peripheral cues play an important role in face-to-face communication. They are often used to notice changes in other’s body, head or eye position and to coordinate actions accordingly (Isaacs and Tang, 1993). In the video media, either a restricted field of view or a low resolution makes these cues hard to discern. Another limitation of a video conference is the difficulty in dealing with physical objects. Not only is sharing or manipulating physical objects across a video link physically impossible, but the information about the objects pointed to in ones own environment is also difficult to convey through video channel. RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION A large body of research has shown that several limitations of videoconferencing can potentially be addressed through better understanding of the task at hand, technological advancements, and innovative designs for a range of tasks. For instance, multiple camera-views could possibly convey peripheral information more effectively (Yamaashi et al, 1996) or a head-orientation based camera could support subtle communication using eye gaze (Takemae et al, 2005). Researchers have expressed mixed opinion about the role of videoconferencing in communication. However, there is growing evidence in support of utility of video. It is believed that visual information from collaborative meetings can be captured more effectively if designers of the systems have a better understanding of communication process and meeting structures. REFERENCES C. Heath, P. Luff, and A. Sellen. 1997. Reconfiguring media space: Supporting collaborative work. Video-Mediated Communication, pages 323–347. R. S. Fish, R. E. Kraut, and B. L. Chalfonte. 1990. The videowindow system in informal communication. ACM CSCW, pages 1–11. J. Foote and D. Kimber. 2000. Flycam: practical panoramic video. ACM Multimedia, pages 487–488. W. W. Gaver. 1992. The affordances of media spaces for collaboration. ACM CSCW, pages 17–24. E. A. Isaacs and J. C. Tang. 1993. What video can and can’t do for collaboration: a case study. ACM Multimedia, pages 199–206. Q. Liu, D. Kimber, J. Foote, L. Wilcox, and J Boreczky. 2002. Flyspec: a multi-user video camera system with hybrid human and automatic control. ACM Multimedia, pages 484–492. S. E. Poltrock and G. Engelbeck. 1997. Requirements for a virtual collocation environment. ACM SIGGROUP, pages 61–70. A. F. Monk and L. A. Watts. 1998. Peripheral participants in mediated communication. ACM CHI, pages 285–286. Polycom. 2010. Polycom, Retrieved May 22, 2010 from Takemae, K. Otsuka, and J. Yamato. 2005. Automatic video editing system using stereo based head tracking for multiparty conversation. ACM CHI, pages 1817–1820. Verizon. 1999. Meetings in America: a study of trends, costs, and attitudes toward business travel and teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity. Retrieved May 22, 2010 from Verizon. 2003. Meetings in America v: Meeting of the minds (mci). Retrieved May 22, 2010 from K. Yamaashi, J. R. Cooperstock, T. Narine, and W. A. S. Buxton. 1996. Beating the limitations of camera-monitor mediated telepresence with extra eyes. ACM CHI, pages 50–57. Read More