SideBar: Videoconferencing System Supporting Social Engagement

Abstract

Companies are increasingly organizing work in globally distributed teams. A core challenge to these distributed teams is, however, to maintain social relationships due to limited opportunities and tools for social engagement. In this paper we present SIDEBAR: a videoconferencing system that enhances virtual meetings by enabling social engagement. Through image analysis of the conference video feed, SIDEBAR tracks meeting participants in real-time. A personal tablet then allows each participant to identify and track other participants, to look up information about them and their local work context, and to engage in peer-to-peer chat conversations. We describe the motivation, design and implementation of SIDEBAR and report results from a preliminary evaluation, which shows that participants found SIDEBAR useful and easy to use. The paper concludes by providing three design guidelines for collaborative technologies supporting social engagement.

Online Mingling: Supporting Ad Hoc, Private Conversations at Virtual Conferences

“…There have been few studies around supporting the matching process. One notable exception is Sidebar [11], a room-to-room videoconferencing system that tracks meeting participants in realtime through image analysis of the conference video feed. It allows each participant to identify and track other participants, to look up information about them and their local work context, and to engage in peer-to-peer chat conversations.…”